A review by jcr610
Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser

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.