Extreme situations often result in extreme decisions. When she received the call about her mother's grave condition, Susanna Sonnenberg was leading a quiet, relatively normal life in Montana. Her first impulse was to make arrangements to fly to her mother's bedside, but then, she reconsidered. Sonnenberg's difficult relationship and long estrangement from her mother led her finally to reject any deathbed reunion. In Her Last Death, she examines the past incidents and tugs of emotion that caused such a drastic gesture of finality. Sometimes jarring, this memoir focuses on wounds and animosity that usually remain unspoken.
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Her Last Death: A Memoir
Narrated by Susanna Sonnenberg
Susanna SonnenbergUnabridged — 8 hours, 6 minutes
![Her Last Death: A Memoir](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.9.4)
Her Last Death: A Memoir
Narrated by Susanna Sonnenberg
Susanna SonnenbergUnabridged — 8 hours, 6 minutes
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Overview
Glamorous, charismatic and a compulsive liar, Susanna's mother seduced everyone who entered her orbit. With outrageous behavior and judgment tinged by drug use, she taught her child the art of sex and the benefits of lying. Susanna struggled to break out of this compelling world, determined, as many daughters are, not to become her mother.
Sonnenberg mines tender and startling memories as she tells of her fierce resolve to forge her independence, to become a woman capable of trust, and to be a good mother to her own children. Her Last Death is riveting, disarming and stunningly told.
Editorial Reviews
"Her Last Death recounts "the true calamity of being daughter to this mother," and the wonder of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and found a way of turning her memories into a fiercely observed, fluently written book that captures the chaos and confusions of her youth, the daughter of an unpredictable pill-and-coke addicted mother and a brilliant, self-absorbed father, neither of whom had the faintest idea of how to be a parent."
The New York Times
"Her Last Death recounts 'the true calamity of being daughter to this mother,' and the wonder of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and found a way of turning her memories into a fiercely observed, fluently written book...Writing in sharp, crystalline prose, Ms. Sonnenberg... plung(es) readers into a sort of perpetual present tense in which we are made to experience, almost firsthand, the inexplicable and perverse behavior of an impossible woman from the point of view of her aghast, bedazzled -- and immensely gifted -- daughter."
This is one of the best memoirs to come on the scene since Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle, though the world of Sonnenberg's childhood is as privileged as Walls's was marked by scarcity and want. With her two daughters, Sonnenberg's single mother, Daphne, managed to remain a part of this rarefied environment by the skin of her teeth, thanks to benevolent grandparents and the occasional contributions of a distant father. But while Daphne appeared electrifying and glamorous to the young Susanna, no amount of good fortune could keep her from descending, lie by lie, addiction by addiction, into as disappointing a figure as the father in The Glass Castle. Susanna's progressive disenchantment with her often abusive mother-Daphne introduced her daughter to cocaine and punched her in the stomach repeatedly for seemingly expressing interest in a new boyfriend-is charted with precise, unsparing, and luminous prose. A heartbreaking yet wickedly entertaining portrait of a magically seductive, immensely flawed mother who fails dramatically as a parent and of a daughter who learns to trust and love others despite an orphanlike upbringing marked by disillusion. Highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ9/1/07.]
Elizabeth Brinkley
A deeply personal account of the author's thorny relationship with her mother. One morning, while "leading an unremarkable life" with her husband and young sons in Montana, Sonnenberg received a phone call with the news that her mother had been severely, probably fatally injured in a car accident. She set about making arrangements to fly to Barbados, where her mother lived, then changed her mind. They were already estranged, but this decision put a definitive end to the single most important and dependent relationship of the author's life. It also led to a breach with her sister, who was outraged that she wouldn't come to an apparently dying woman's bedside, then was stuck with the caretaking responsibilities when their mother recovered. The author's remembrances are designed to justify her decision not to go. She depicts her mother as a stunning and seductive pathological liar with a long history of cocaine and painkiller abuse, as well as unscrupulous sexual behavior. The author spent many years entangled in her mother's capricious demands, often unable to discern truth from lies. The shocking details Sonnenberg provides about her upbringing certainly show her mother behaving recklessly. The lack of maternal nurturing prompted a hunger in her for fulfillment elsewhere, first in romantic relationships and then as a mother herself. Yet they were close for decades, albeit often in an unhealthy way. Readers may not entirely understand the author's extreme choice to end contact altogether, or entirely credit her assertion that the distance between them now serves as a comfort. The permanent rift with her sister serves as a reminder of the cost of Sonnenberg's choice, with which she grapplesto live. Tragic but arresting-a worthy companion to Simone de Beauvoir's and Vivian Gornick's explorations of the complicated mother-daughter dynamic.
"Her Last Death recounts 'the true calamity of being daughter to this mother,' and the wonder of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and found a way of turning her memories into a fiercely observed, fluently written book...Writing in sharp, crystalline prose, Ms. Sonnenberg... plung(es) readers into a sort of perpetual present tense in which we are made to experience, almost firsthand, the inexplicable and perverse behavior of an impossible woman from the point of view of her aghast, bedazzled and immensely gifted daughter." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"An irresistible book that is shimmering with life and the portrait of a glorious, frenzied, seductive woman who of necessity has been left, along with Susanna Sonnenberg's young womanhood, behind. Her mother."
James Salter, author of Last Night and Burning the Days
"Riveting, sexy, smart, and brazenly honest, Her Last Death is a memoir that demands and rewards total immersion. I couldn't put it down, didn't want to, and was sorry when it was over. Susanna Sonnenberg is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvelous debut."
John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road and Claire Marvel
"Her Last Death is an emotional thriller. It is a manual for men and smart, searching individuals of any age or economic levels. For most of the book it is a disturbing story, yet at the end you might feel like cheering. It is a beautiful, beautiful book and I plan to give it to my nearest and dearest."
Frank McCourt, author of Angela's Ashes and Teacher Man
Sonnenberg's memoir is filled with traumatic scenes of growing up, owing to her mother's addiction to sex, drugs, and lying. Sonnenberg is quite young, for example, when she finds her mother babbling incoherently, a needle dangling from her arm. After Sonnenberg plunges in the syringe, her mother rejoins, “Thank you, darling." Life is filled with the inappropriate. Sonnenberg's later struggles to adjust to marriage and parenting are recounted in a style that is just as frank. What's missing is a sense of resolution. Despite the author's claims that she has made her own life, choosing estrangement from her mother and sister, her reading projects tones of anger, hurt, and longing that belie her claims. S.W. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
Product Details
BN ID: | 2940171004569 |
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Publisher: | Simon & Schuster |
Publication date: | 01/01/2008 |
Edition description: | Unabridged |
Read an Excerpt
The phone shouldn't ring this early. When I answer, my aunt Irene rushes into the news. "Your mother's been in an accident. She's been in surgery all night. She's probably going to die." This can't be true, of course. I'm waiting for the story. Irene will laugh her exasperated laugh and say my mother used to date the surgeon. Or she's already secured a better hospital room. But Irene says my mother's in a coma, and when she finishes that sentence, I stop moving around the kitchen and sit. She usually calls her sister Daphne, but she keeps saying "your mother." My mother had a head-on collision after a dinner party. I want to ask if she was sober. Irene probably asked the same question of the person who called to tell her.
"The police have a record this time," she says. "The hospital has a chart." The adrenaline of true emergency goes through me, and I draw a blank. I keep thinking, "My mother had an accident," but the thought has nowhere to settle and stick. "Susy?" my aunt says. She's worried for me. If I speak, I'll say, "Do I have to go?" So I mustn't open my mouth. I try to think what other people say in this situation. I'm afraid my mother will die. I'm afraid she won't.
In a house in Montana thousands of miles from my mother, I am thirty-seven, leading an unremarkable life. My mother lives in Barbados, where she stayed after her third husband died. I've never seen her house. She plays tennis and has houseguests, I hear, but we don't speak. Instead, I concentrate on the organic granola my two boys like, the seascape mural I'm about to paint on their bedroom wall. I preside over their school board and review movies for the paper. I send the photos of Halloween costumes and birthday parties to my father and stepmother. Last night, like most nights, my husband and I read books to each of the boys, crossing back and forth between their beds with kisses for them and patient hugs for their stuffed animals. This morning my husband will pack the lunch for our six-year-old, and I'll play with the two-year-old until his nap. We've just purchased this hundred-year-old house. On moving day I realized we would never invite my mother to see it. We live in sunny rooms messy with socks and books, a bathroom scattered with tub toys that are always drying, never dry. Christopher and I wonder before sleep at our boys' happiness and their invisible trust. Sometimes I'm jealous of them.
I've lived apart from my mother since I left for boarding school at fourteen. I called home often then, pressing her voice to my ear, our mutual interest insatiable. She called me from restaurant cloakrooms and lovers' beds, ready to start new rumors. She called from hospitals after back surgery. She phoned from airports, dinner parties and the lobbies of movie theaters in which she stood weeping over a love story. She needed me, she said, to calm her down.
She was suddenly better. She was cured. She didn't want to talk about any of it. She felt good now, she said. Could she visit, see the baby? My sister and I matched up our pieces of her recovery. We were used to checking with each other (" -- and please don't tell your sister"), fitting together a complete story from the fragments she discarded. But we couldn't get these details to align. The discrepancies were too great, and we didn't want to notice this together. Then a family friend told me Daphne hadn't been "incommunicado" for six weeks of radiation. She'd been at a spa in France or at a diet clinic. There was no doctor. It was an invented doctor.
I'm alone at the kitchen table, and I call my sister in Barbados, embarrassed I'm still at home. Right away she starts reporting. After three surgeries in thirty-six hours, the doctors are coping with our mother's shattered shins and pelvis. Her front teeth are gone; her organs won't reveal their damage for a few days. The details stagger me. Penelope knows too much and too little. Where's the relief of the con unveiled, the act resolved? But there's only my sister in dry tears and our mother, who won't wake up.
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