Summary
We all know the damage that a former disciple or acolyte can do with a hatchet job on what was once his or her icon, but, as this memoir of Susan Sontag demonstrates, a fond, still appreciative retrospective portrait can be even more devastating. For the total absence of malice in this insider's portrait of Sontag makes what it reveals infinitely more powerful than if all this had been delivered wrapped in outrage, bitterness and disillusion, a mere sorry tale of victimization. But make no mistake, no one could read "Sempre Susan" and come away with a favorable view of its subject. The funny thing is that its author, who hasn't really quite seen through her in her nostalgia-tinged lenses, still does.
Sigrid Nunez was a writer in her mid-20s, struggling to make her way in New York, when a job helping Susan Sontag with her correspondence in 1976 transported her into the maelstrom surrounding a woman already famous, in the self-referential cocoon of insular literary life centered in Manhattan, for being famous. All at once, this outsider was swept into the inner sanctum, caught up in webs and networks as complicated as anything in an Iris Murdoch novel. No sooner had she become part of the magic circle than Ms. Nunez found herself Sontag's son's girlfriend.See the full content of this document
Extract
Struggling Writer and Her Mentors
The reader is in no doubt as to how this happened: "He was shy. She was not," we are told. And so ensued a strange menage with a mother who knew no boundaries, even dispensing adv...
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