Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag

Product Description

Sigrid Nunez was an aspiring writer when she first met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, blinding intelligence, and edgy personal style. Sontag introduced Nunez to her son, the writer David Rieff, and the two began dating. Soon Nunez moved into the apartment that Rieff and Sontag shared. As Sontag told Nunez, 'Who says we have to live like everyone else?'

Sontag's influence on Nunez, who went on to become a successful novelist, would be profound. Described by Nunez as 'a natural mentor' who saw educating others as both a moral obligation and a source of endless pleasure, Sontag inevitably infected those around her with her many cultural and intellectual passions. In this poignant, intimate memoir, Nunez speaks of her gratitude for having had, as an early model, 'someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer's vocation.'

Published more than six years after Sontag's death, Sempre Susan is a startlingly truthful portrait of this outsized personality, who made being an intellectual a glamorous occupation.

Nunez, an uncompromising talent in her own right, offers the most vibrant and multifaceted portrait of Sontag to date.' Vogue

'Sontag once wrote about feeling estranged from the 'Susan Sontag' who stood on the spine of the books she had written. In Nunez's Sempre Susan, the gap between the writer and the person who wrote the books is made all the more vividly real - a reminder of the extraordinary transformative work that goes into writing in the first place.' Slate

'Nunez's book is an elegy for a great woman and the company she kept, the vanished salon where she was the center.' The New York Observer