A review by sophronisba
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser

5.0

Brilliant biography. Easily one of the best books of 2019, maybe of the decade. What made the big splash when this book was released was Moser's theory that Susan Sontag wrote her husband Philip Rieff's book about Freud. Maybe she did. (The New Yorker reviewer disagrees, strongly and at great length.) But I found myself less interested in the question of authorship and more interested in whether her pursuit of greatness made her happy. At some point one of her acquaintances -- I think it was Jamaica Kincaid? -- tells Moser that knowing Susan made her never want to be great. She was a devastatingly difficult person to be around, hard to be friends with, hard to be partners with, hard to be parented by. (I finished this book with profound sympathy for Annie Leibovitz and David Rieff.) And Sontag doesn't seem to have been particularly happy. And yet you can't deny she got what she wanted -- a shelf full of books that people still talk about.