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dcorki's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
austindoherty's review against another edition
5.0
Perfect bio. Dishy, deeply sourced, lots of access, admiring but skeptical of its formidable, flawed subject. I will never recover from the image of Sontag, a whirling dervish in her silk scarves, mimicking the evasion of Sarajevo sniper fire outside a California Baskin Robbins.
oboreads's review against another edition
4.0
A detailed account of a cultural critic who lived with many emotional nuances and personal entanglements. The memoir depicted a women who strove for intellectualism, but failed to grasp the emotional depths of a world. Although I admire all the work Sontag has created and the legacies she set forth, the memoir puts into question the life of a public intellectual. Does being a public intellectual bring any benefits to one?
[How should one live?] "Sontag had always turned to literature, to art, to help her answer this question. Art offered a model of solidarity. But to aestheticize is to distort, she argued throughout her life. And her own life illustrates this thesis as eloquently as anything in her writing. Does metaphor deepen one's relation to reality - or, to the contrary, pervert and pollute it? Put another way: Can Dostoevsky help you get along with your son?"
"Metaphor meant so many things; and among its sinister powers was its ability to disguise evil by dressing it in other names. Thousands of years ago, Confucius wrote that the abuse of metaphor led to the destruction of society, because tyranny began with language. The warning could never be repeated enough. In every generation, it needed to be relearned, often at hideous costs." (685)
"Sontag wrote that photographs allowed reality, including the reality of other people's suffering, to be packaged as a consumer item."
[How should one live?] "Sontag had always turned to literature, to art, to help her answer this question. Art offered a model of solidarity. But to aestheticize is to distort, she argued throughout her life. And her own life illustrates this thesis as eloquently as anything in her writing. Does metaphor deepen one's relation to reality - or, to the contrary, pervert and pollute it? Put another way: Can Dostoevsky help you get along with your son?"
"Metaphor meant so many things; and among its sinister powers was its ability to disguise evil by dressing it in other names. Thousands of years ago, Confucius wrote that the abuse of metaphor led to the destruction of society, because tyranny began with language. The warning could never be repeated enough. In every generation, it needed to be relearned, often at hideous costs." (685)
"Sontag wrote that photographs allowed reality, including the reality of other people's suffering, to be packaged as a consumer item."
jcr610's review against another edition
5.0
I was endlessly fascinated by Susan Sontag before this and probably would’ve read a biography twice as long. But this one does an excellent job of living up to its subject. It offers an honest, perceptive complement to the picture Sontag presented of herself in her journals. Her intense, preternatural intellectual drive is set against the backdrop of a banal Tucson childhood, an alcoholic mother, her lifelong struggle with her homosexuality, and what Moser identifies as a kind of empathy deficiency that plagued her relationships. Sontag's writings and life spread out so widely that it was hard, before reading this, for me to see the connections from something like "Notes on Camp" to her activism in Sarajevo to the somber reflections of Regarding the Pain of Others and then her novels. But Moser brilliantly ties her intellectual development to her personal development. Neither undercut the other, necessarily. Sontag's writings were unflappable when successful and transparent in their faults when not. Moser's intent isn't to take her down a few notches (as so many seemed to want to do during her life, intimidated by her brilliance). Rather, the biography does what Sontag struggled to do by humanizing her lofty ideas and actions. For example, although I don't totally agree with the reading that "The Way We Live Now" failed the movement to recognize the AIDS crisis by not naming the disease and AIDS and Its Metaphors failed it by being too abstract, the biography provides a wrenching picture of the grief and loss in her life when she wrote these. I especially appreciated understanding more about her work in Sarajevo. I never quite understood whether I should admire it or see it as a vain and pointless "celebrity" intervention, and I also didn't get how it fit with the rest of her work. But it comes across as a very moving and even heroic culmination of her desire to connect thought with the body (thus pain and suffering) at a time when few others were giving nearly as much credence to the genocide that was going on. I don't think you can say that someone so committed to shedding every form of her skin she didn't like was completely authentic, but she was incredibly sincere and serious. She lived and died by what she thought, for better and worse. I broke down crying at the end hearing about her reaching for her son on her deathbed. It's amazing--and painful--to learn how much she craved love, and how her brain often put her at odds with that. Anyway, I could go on... I'm obsessed... I now need to find more of Sontag to devour.
amymapsmith's review against another edition
4.0
I was introduced to Susan Sontag in college when I read On Photography and Regarding the Pain of Others for a photography class. She must have just passed away about that time, because a group of us went to hear Annie Leibovitz give a lecture, and I remember her talking a lot about Susan Sontag. In fact, it seemed she couldn't talk about much else. I remember wondering why she decided to do the speaking tour at all, she was so, so sad. Until reading this biography, that was what I knew of Sontag – she wrote about photography, and she had a profound impact on a photographer I admired. Moser's account of Sontag's life, thorough to the point of being tedious at times, filled in the blank spaces. From childhood through adolescence to adulthood to her final days, Moser presents a balanced depiction of a complicated person, with the good as well as the bad. At moments I found myself inspired by how Sontag seemed to do whatever the fuck she wanted all the time. At other times I felt pangs of empathy for the people in her life she treated with a blend of tough love, disrespect, and sometimes outright dismissal. A worthwhile – and for anyone who's been influenced by Sontag, important – read/listen.
leda's review against another edition
4.0
Like Susan Sontag, I spent most of my adolescence in a hurry to read all the books I could find. Like Sontag. I am devoted to the idea of transformation. “I‘m only interested in people engaged in a project of transformation,” Sontag wrote in her journal in 1971. “If the desire for transformation can derive from a lack of positive self-satisfaction, it is also the enemy of self-satisfaction in the negative sense, of smugness and complacency,” argues Benjamin Moser, the author of the Sontag’s biography.
In the 1990s, I found in second-hand bookstore a small Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of a young Susan Sontag. It was titled 'Against Interpretation' and it was a series of articles and essays where Sontag analyses popular culture as well as high culture and discusses artists and intellectuals. Sontag had seemingly read everything - from Sophocles to Nietzsche and Camus, Godard, Sartre, Barthes, etc. “Interpretation,” she wrote “is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
Sontag taught me not to trust the critics – an irony, as she was herself a critic. She has also change the way I see art, the way I read books and the way I write about books.
Read more on Notes of a Curious Mind
In the 1990s, I found in second-hand bookstore a small Dell paperback with a front-cover photograph of a young Susan Sontag. It was titled 'Against Interpretation' and it was a series of articles and essays where Sontag analyses popular culture as well as high culture and discusses artists and intellectuals. Sontag had seemingly read everything - from Sophocles to Nietzsche and Camus, Godard, Sartre, Barthes, etc. “Interpretation,” she wrote “is the revenge of the intellect upon art.”
Sontag taught me not to trust the critics – an irony, as she was herself a critic. She has also change the way I see art, the way I read books and the way I write about books.
Read more on Notes of a Curious Mind
minalouise's review against another edition
Large parts of this made me feel almost paralysed and nauseous, not necessarily because of the book or the subject but the feeling of private conversations being public property. Which unfortunately has not been a foreign subject to me lately, but unfortunately I am not dead.
I keep thinking I would never want a biography to ever be written about me. I’m not Susan Sontag and I don’t know what she felt or would have wanted, and if I remember correctly she also didn’t give the clear go ahead for her son to publish her diaries, she mentioned them to him on her deathbed but didn’t clarify whether she wanted them to be published but he did, and has wondered later if that was the right thing to do. Which gave me pause while reading her journals. It was also mentioned in this book that she protected certain writings about her ex-husband when it came to her archives and didn’t want anything that could ruin his reputation to come out while he was still alive at the very least, so maybe that means she also didn’t care what happened to her reputation after she was dead.
From her diaries I got the impression she was very insecure, very brilliant, incredibly hard on herself and also dedicated to her genius, for better and for worse, which she seemed very clear about. It was human and sometimes painful to read, but also admirable. Whether he started this project already disliking her, or it grew as he was doing the research for this book is unclear. Mosers contempt and disrespect for her is evident throughout the whole book, but especially later in the book where he criticises her for not having been able to come out as a lesbian, especially during the AIDS crisis. While also praising her ‘Notes on Camp’. She wrote about discovering her desire for women in her teens, and wrote about her sex life with women, and not always liking sex with men, how it was humiliating. But she did also marry a man and wrote of a very passionate sex life in the beginning, and I dont think the reason of the divorce was necessarily her lesbianism or even attraction to women. Whether she was bisexual or a lesbian is no one business (also she told her assistant that she didn't like the label lesbian, as she had also been with men). Her relationship with her sexuality is no ones business. At the beginning of the book he wrote of how she would scale back her apparent Jewishness to people she deemed wouldn’t appreciate it, and allowed herself to be more honest about her heritage with people she felt appreciated it, so I dont see how she would act differently about something like her sexuality publicly. Several parts of her identity seemed malleable. She read and wrote and did more than most of us ever will in a lifetime, ad she was deeply flawed but she never pretended to be anything but.
The idea of friends and past lovers speaking to a biographer about me makes my skin crawl, and has ever since I read the Laure Adler biography of Marguerite Duras (who clearly didn’t want anyone but herself to write about her!). One thing is presenting journals as what they are, which is someones notes from their life, partly memories they want to keep, or problems they are working through, or setting rules for one self (like Sontag did), and keeping score of the books they read and the books they want to read etc. and allowing people that glimpse into someones life, and another is reaching out to ex-friends and -lovers, maybe scorned and adding their testimony as fact without ever being able to ask the other person involved in the relationship.
It’s clear that I dislike this biography for reasons other than feeling like the whole genre isn’t exactly moral, I do however already own his biography on Clarice Lispector so I will read that and compare his disposition.
I keep thinking I would never want a biography to ever be written about me. I’m not Susan Sontag and I don’t know what she felt or would have wanted, and if I remember correctly she also didn’t give the clear go ahead for her son to publish her diaries, she mentioned them to him on her deathbed but didn’t clarify whether she wanted them to be published but he did, and has wondered later if that was the right thing to do. Which gave me pause while reading her journals. It was also mentioned in this book that she protected certain writings about her ex-husband when it came to her archives and didn’t want anything that could ruin his reputation to come out while he was still alive at the very least, so maybe that means she also didn’t care what happened to her reputation after she was dead.
From her diaries I got the impression she was very insecure, very brilliant, incredibly hard on herself and also dedicated to her genius, for better and for worse, which she seemed very clear about. It was human and sometimes painful to read, but also admirable. Whether he started this project already disliking her, or it grew as he was doing the research for this book is unclear. Mosers contempt and disrespect for her is evident throughout the whole book, but especially later in the book where he criticises her for not having been able to come out as a lesbian, especially during the AIDS crisis. While also praising her ‘Notes on Camp’. She wrote about discovering her desire for women in her teens, and wrote about her sex life with women, and not always liking sex with men, how it was humiliating. But she did also marry a man and wrote of a very passionate sex life in the beginning, and I dont think the reason of the divorce was necessarily her lesbianism or even attraction to women. Whether she was bisexual or a lesbian is no one business (also she told her assistant that she didn't like the label lesbian, as she had also been with men). Her relationship with her sexuality is no ones business. At the beginning of the book he wrote of how she would scale back her apparent Jewishness to people she deemed wouldn’t appreciate it, and allowed herself to be more honest about her heritage with people she felt appreciated it, so I dont see how she would act differently about something like her sexuality publicly. Several parts of her identity seemed malleable. She read and wrote and did more than most of us ever will in a lifetime, ad she was deeply flawed but she never pretended to be anything but.
The idea of friends and past lovers speaking to a biographer about me makes my skin crawl, and has ever since I read the Laure Adler biography of Marguerite Duras (who clearly didn’t want anyone but herself to write about her!). One thing is presenting journals as what they are, which is someones notes from their life, partly memories they want to keep, or problems they are working through, or setting rules for one self (like Sontag did), and keeping score of the books they read and the books they want to read etc. and allowing people that glimpse into someones life, and another is reaching out to ex-friends and -lovers, maybe scorned and adding their testimony as fact without ever being able to ask the other person involved in the relationship.
It’s clear that I dislike this biography for reasons other than feeling like the whole genre isn’t exactly moral, I do however already own his biography on Clarice Lispector so I will read that and compare his disposition.
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