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jennyshank's review
3.0
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20130111-book-review-she-matters-a-life-in-friendships-by-susanna-sonnenberg.ece
She Matters
A Life in Friendships
Susanna Sonnenberg
(Scribner, $24)
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Published: 11 January 2013 06:44 PM
Susanna Sonnenberg’s 2008 memoir Her Last Death detailed her Manhattan childhood with an extravagant, inappropriate and singularly crazy mother who followed “cocaine-fierce days” with “sluggish comas on the bed.”
She escaped her mother’s orbit, moving to Missoula to marry, work and raise two sons. In She Matters: A Life in Friendships, Sonnenberg chronicles the female friendships that sustained and challenged her in ways that are particularly acute due to her lack of a steady maternal figure.
Sonnenberg’s mother makes only a cameo appearance in She Matters, but it’s a telling one. “My mother always had a main best friend,” Sonnenberg writes, “a passionate, sudden sister who’d last a year, maybe.”
Although the Internet now makes it possible to maintain friendships that might have naturally sloughed off, Sonnenberg, like her mother, has a knack for forcing friendships to their conclusion. Her vivid prose is confessional and precise; she tackles her friendships with the same forcefulness, making a “sudden sister” out of women who often reject her when marriage, children or other obligations claim their time or when they change, no longer welcoming her bawdy conversation. One asks her, “Why are you sitting here, Susanna, telling me this, this, this unattractive story?”
Sonnenberg’s intensity might be rough on friendships, but it makes for charged storytelling. The essays each detail a different friend or two, such as her elementary school chums Jenny and Gwen, who provide sweet solace from her disordered home. “Each girl was a jewel,” she writes, “a clue that it was possible to have no drama at all. Boredom, they showed me, was an important form of love.”
After Jenny and Gwen leave the scene, however, there’s not much boredom in She Matters. In “The Root Cellar,” Sonnenberg mentions how she began sleeping with her English teacher at boarding school in Colorado at 16, never telling her best friend Claudia, at his creepy insistence. “You’re involved in something now she will not understand,” he told her.
After graduation, Sonnenberg flies back to Colorado and finds Claudia, who has just had an abortion, shacked up with an unappealing, doobie-smoking man at least twice her age, who inhabits a soil-floored root cellar like a misbegotten Hobbit. Sonnenberg wants to tell Claudia to leave him, but cannot, given her ongoing trysts with Professor Molester and her failure to be honest about them.
In She Matters, Sonnenberg continues writing with the sexual frankness that characterized Her Last Death — although late in the book, she confesses adultery to her husband, resulting in a “marriage reimagined and reshaped,” but offers no specifics about what this arrangement might be. It feels prurient to ask for more on this subject, but hey, she’s the one who has been so unstinting up to this moment. Perhaps Sonnenberg is saving that story for a subsequent book.
Despite its rampant drama, there are plenty of insights in She Matters even for those who tend to maintain friendships with the loyal and mellow geniality of a Labrador. For example, when Claudia’s father dies, Sonnenberg doesn’t really understand her grief. “Had I paid attention,” she writes, “she would have shown me a first real lesson about grief, its disorganizing confusions, its inescapable solitude.”
Later in the book, Sonnenberg writes of her own father’s devastating death. Connie, an impressive friend who has written plays, essays and screenplays that earned a “Tony nomination, esteemed prizes and Pulitzer consideration,” happened to be there for Sonnenberg the day her father died. Connie was not Sonnenberg’s closest friend, but she was a vital one.
Although most people’s friendship histories are tamer than Sonnenberg’s, She Matters will set them to remembering, and perhaps to calling an old, once-inseparable pal.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
She Matters
A Life in Friendships
Susanna Sonnenberg
(Scribner, $24)
By JENNY SHANK Special Contributor
Published: 11 January 2013 06:44 PM
Susanna Sonnenberg’s 2008 memoir Her Last Death detailed her Manhattan childhood with an extravagant, inappropriate and singularly crazy mother who followed “cocaine-fierce days” with “sluggish comas on the bed.”
She escaped her mother’s orbit, moving to Missoula to marry, work and raise two sons. In She Matters: A Life in Friendships, Sonnenberg chronicles the female friendships that sustained and challenged her in ways that are particularly acute due to her lack of a steady maternal figure.
Sonnenberg’s mother makes only a cameo appearance in She Matters, but it’s a telling one. “My mother always had a main best friend,” Sonnenberg writes, “a passionate, sudden sister who’d last a year, maybe.”
Although the Internet now makes it possible to maintain friendships that might have naturally sloughed off, Sonnenberg, like her mother, has a knack for forcing friendships to their conclusion. Her vivid prose is confessional and precise; she tackles her friendships with the same forcefulness, making a “sudden sister” out of women who often reject her when marriage, children or other obligations claim their time or when they change, no longer welcoming her bawdy conversation. One asks her, “Why are you sitting here, Susanna, telling me this, this, this unattractive story?”
Sonnenberg’s intensity might be rough on friendships, but it makes for charged storytelling. The essays each detail a different friend or two, such as her elementary school chums Jenny and Gwen, who provide sweet solace from her disordered home. “Each girl was a jewel,” she writes, “a clue that it was possible to have no drama at all. Boredom, they showed me, was an important form of love.”
After Jenny and Gwen leave the scene, however, there’s not much boredom in She Matters. In “The Root Cellar,” Sonnenberg mentions how she began sleeping with her English teacher at boarding school in Colorado at 16, never telling her best friend Claudia, at his creepy insistence. “You’re involved in something now she will not understand,” he told her.
After graduation, Sonnenberg flies back to Colorado and finds Claudia, who has just had an abortion, shacked up with an unappealing, doobie-smoking man at least twice her age, who inhabits a soil-floored root cellar like a misbegotten Hobbit. Sonnenberg wants to tell Claudia to leave him, but cannot, given her ongoing trysts with Professor Molester and her failure to be honest about them.
In She Matters, Sonnenberg continues writing with the sexual frankness that characterized Her Last Death — although late in the book, she confesses adultery to her husband, resulting in a “marriage reimagined and reshaped,” but offers no specifics about what this arrangement might be. It feels prurient to ask for more on this subject, but hey, she’s the one who has been so unstinting up to this moment. Perhaps Sonnenberg is saving that story for a subsequent book.
Despite its rampant drama, there are plenty of insights in She Matters even for those who tend to maintain friendships with the loyal and mellow geniality of a Labrador. For example, when Claudia’s father dies, Sonnenberg doesn’t really understand her grief. “Had I paid attention,” she writes, “she would have shown me a first real lesson about grief, its disorganizing confusions, its inescapable solitude.”
Later in the book, Sonnenberg writes of her own father’s devastating death. Connie, an impressive friend who has written plays, essays and screenplays that earned a “Tony nomination, esteemed prizes and Pulitzer consideration,” happened to be there for Sonnenberg the day her father died. Connie was not Sonnenberg’s closest friend, but she was a vital one.
Although most people’s friendship histories are tamer than Sonnenberg’s, She Matters will set them to remembering, and perhaps to calling an old, once-inseparable pal.
Jenny Shank’s first novel, The Ringer, won the High Plains Book Award.
kermittuesday's review
3.0
I'm trying to separate the actual book from the hype I heard about it, but it's hard. I expected a book about the fortifying nature of female friendships, but most of the stories were about disagreements and friendships that didn't last. I don't think a friendship needs to last to be valuable, but that didn't seem to be the focus. I don't know, Sonneberg writes well, maybe it just wasn't my thing.
shannonrkline's review
4.0
Really enjoyed the writing and the insight, but wouldn't personally want to be friends with the author. ;) This book did inspire me to reflect on my female relationships and how I can be a better friend. I'll be thinking about this one for awhile. (Thanks for the gift, Kirby!)
chantaldjohnson's review
3.0
I felt conflicted after I finished this essay style tell-all from Sonnenberg about her past female friendships. While I devoured her writing, which I thought was open, honest, and even dangerous, this book ended up not being what I'd hoped it been. Which I think actually ended up being a good thing. She Matters doesn't offer the cookie cutter version of female friendship that is often portrayed. It's so raw that it often made me uncomfortable. Sonnenberg is about 25 years older than me, so I've had a lot less life experience. So reading all of the stories was interesting to me and also eye opening. However, I was rubbed the wrong way several times. I can't relate to not having parents that weren't there for me, and the complicated relationship with her mother definitely affected her for the worse. But I just couldn't deal with so many of the failed friendships. Once someone changed or stopped being what she needed them to be, she fled immediately. Which is brave to admit, but kind of shitty. I'm not knocking her for who she is because all of us are flawed humans. I just found it hard to relate, especially since I tend to try to be equal in my friendships and definitely give more. She would say how she liked to provide protection for her friends but then would always act like a little girl when they couldn't be there for her. Which again I'm sure ties back to her relationship with her mother. I think I'd be interested in reading her memoir. While this book has some pretty amazing writing--the last chapters where she deals with her father's death were incredibly written--I didn't take away much from it, unfortunately. Other than the fact that friends come and go all the time and we as women have to work harder to retain and maintain the good ones.
joyxrm1's review against another edition
I wanted to like this book, but I just couldn't feel any warmth or emotional generosity from the author. She seems constantly disappointed with her friends. I would have tried to finish it, but everyone in my bookclub said it didn't get any better.
simsarah79's review against another edition
5.0
This is the truest account of friendships between women that I have ever read. Susanna can write about anything and I'll just swoon over her poetic voice but this book exemplifies what it's really like to be a woman looking for kinship in this generation. She has a plethora of people who come into her life at various points and she recounts with great detail the occasions that brought them together, what kept them afloat and then more often than not what broke them up. Some of it is sad, some triumphant some a little dark and vulnerable but such an echo to my life... even if I haven't had all the experiences I know I've had all the feelings all the hangups all the confusion and jealousy and equality etc etc etc. She is a wonderful person to read as a woman, a mother a friend and an aching heart.
alli_teration's review against another edition
2.0
I enjoyed this book until about half way through. Then I got bored of the complaining, the egocentric view of these friendships.
It just got to whiny for me.....
It just got to whiny for me.....
sdbecque's review against another edition
4.0
I picked this up on a whim at the library, and then I read it all in one go on a long car trip. I liked it a lot. She has a way of talking about and describing the world of female friendships that seemed very honest and true. Also I'm a sucker for a memoir about friendship.
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