As the story goes, when Susanna Sonnenberg was 2 years old, Norman Mailer took one look at her and pronounced to her mother that ”Susy’s got a great ass. It’s going to get her into trouble one day.” The anecdote means to both impress and horrify, and it captures the flavor of Her Last Death, Sonnenberg’s bracing memoir about growing up rich and glamorous with a savagely inappropriate, drug-addicted mother. This is a world where Bob Dylan is a neighbor, Grandpa had an affair with Ingrid Bergman, and Mum tearfully gives her child a Montblanc fountain pen and a gram of cocaine for her 16th birthday. For every breathless tale of outrageousness, Sonnenberg simultaneously struggles, with cool gravity, to grapple with what it means to be the daughter of a liar. Throughout the narrative, she second-guesses her memories, and gives airtime to the family members who shrug off her recollection of events.
…Daphne got her drunk at 12, bragged about sleeping with her teenage love interests, overdosed in front of her, and punched her in the stomach if she ever thought her daughter was giving her own boyfriend the eye. Daphne was beautiful and funny but in every way a disgrace of a parent. No wonder the author ended up confusing sex for power and screwed her way through her 20s. There are points in the author’s chronicles of seduction — maybe around the time she squirts raspberries into a magazine writer’s mouth and beds an Orthodox rabbi — that Sonnenberg risks becoming that tiresome girl at the party for whom other women have little patience.
Michiko Kakutani writes for the NYT:
When Susanna Sonnenberg was 10 years old, her mother bought her a copy of Penthouse magazine and told her to read one of the letters aloud.
When she was 12, her mother gave her some cocaine and told her how to tell “the difference between the dealers you could trust and those who were just cokeheads.”
When she was 14, her mother seduced — or pretended to seduce — the older brother of one of her friends.
“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.
Writing in sharp, crystalline prose, Ms. Sonnenberg describes the glamorous but highly treacherous Manhattan world she grew up in, while limning her parents’ penchant for the theatrical gesture. Her maternal grandfather was a famous musician who played Carnegie Hall; her maternal grandmother, a dead ringer for Carole Lombard, lived in a hotel in New York, had an apartment in Monte Carlo and presided over a grand estate in Barbados. Her paternal grandparents lived in an ornate town house on Gramercy Park and maintained two summer houses in Provincetown.
