Books |
Her Last Death
Susanna Sonnenberg
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Memoir
What kind of daughter gets the most dreaded of all phone calls — “Your mother’s been in an accident, she’s probably going to die” — and doesn’t drop everything to rush to mom’s bedside?
In this case, a smart one.
Eternal vigilance, someone said, is the price you pay for not turning into your parents. And that’s for garden-variety neurotic folk like you and me. For the kids of parents who should never have become parents — the hard core druggies, the passionate narcissists, the spoiled rotten rich — it’s much harder. To hear the stories those kids tell is to wonder: Why didn’t you self-destruct?
Of these horror stories, Susanna Sonnenberg’s is a stunner. “It’s official — the worst mother, ever,” one reviewer wrote, and I don’t disagree. Susanna’s mother abuses drugs so casually she mixes them with tap water before injecting her thigh, encourages her single-digit-aged daughter to masturbate, seduces (or pretends to) her kid’s boyfriend. That she shamelessly drops names and makes her sick self the center of every conversation — in this family, that’s not even a misdemeanor.[ To buy the paperback from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle download, click here.]
The father’s no peach, either. He becomes afflicted with multiple sclerosis, which buys him some slack later on, but he’s already done his share of damage. Just one example: How do you justify taking your grade-school daughter to the movies and blaming her for doing nothing when a guy gropes her?
I say it all the time: We become what we behold. It doesn’t matter what our parents tell us, we imprint who and what they are. So what are the odds that Susanna’s teen years are about school and extra-curricular activities and making sure she gets into a good college?
Good guess.
Readers who don’t like to read about fucking — I’m not trying to shock, I’m making a distinction; there is “making love” and there is “sex” and then there is the third thing, “fucking,” which is loveless and compulsive and yet, in its way, extravagantly hot — should stay clear of this book, because there’s a ton of it here. And not just the mother. Susanna gets off to what, in her family, is a slow start, but by 16 she’s doing it with her English teacher, and in her early 20s, she sleeps with anyone who crosses her path.
So, you ask, what’s in this squalor for me?
First, redemption. Many of us believe that people don’t change. But the last half of “Her Last Death” chronicles Susanna Sonnenberg’s path from talented loser to wife and mother of two. It’s not a pretty story — there’s backsliding galore — but it’s credible, and moving, and surely an inspiration to anyone who’s lost and thinks there’s no way out of the hole.
And then there’s the writing. Susanna Sonnenberg puts you in the room and keeps you in the room. And something harder: She doesn’t step back and judge. Was her mother bipolar? Reads like it. But Sonnenberg is too good a writer to turn her book into a tract about a woman who needed help and a family and culture that didn’t know enough to provide it. And because she doesn’t judge, we never catch a break. We’re in it with her, begging her not to get engaged to the gambler who doesn’t love her, willing her to break up with the chilly and controlling Brit, praying that she doesn’t lose her first good relationship by confessing a meaningless lesbian affair.
Funny thing. Susanna Sonnenberg’s grandfather — the source of the money that started the chain of indulgence and sickness — was Benjamin Sonnenberg, who more or less invented public relations in America. He commanded huge fees for expert spin; you could say that deception was the family business. Generations later, his granddaughter has told her story as harsh truth. Good for her.
