Benjamin Moser

I am a fan of biographies that are well-written and this is one of the best. Moser weaves the details of Sontag's life in with the ideas that moved her to write in a way that reads like a beautiful novel. The result leaves the reader with the feeling that one knows her from the inside out and shares in her successes, her hesitations, and her ability to embrace the world of ideas as well as the visceral world of human relations.

An exhaustive award winning study of one of the most complex women who ever lived. A darling of the New York literary society who for decades was a Jekyll and Hyde with the people who knew and loved her. She was driven in life by feelings of abandonment by her beautiful mother who was often absent. Sontag treated her son in the same way. She was a lovely woman who was never alone but felt lonely. After a short marriage producing her son all of her other meaningful personal relationships were show more with women. She would never admit to being bisexual. A really interesting read. show less

I feel like everything I've ever read has been priming me for Clarice Lispector; not that she's my new favorite writer, but I'm able to read her books entirely without suspicion. She writes about emotion, not melodrama, writes about experience as though it were the first time ever felt. Reminds me of music. Attempts to elucidate her mystique show how transparent she really is, vulnerable even, vulnerability being such a rare and precious thing in writers. "Still alive because it was only 9 show more in the morning," from a short story. And something, I can't find the quote, about sorrow without anger, like looking for the seafloor from a boat and not finding it, from "Near to the Wild Heart." Love it, can't get enough. show less

A fine, intense and detailed biography of US intellectual, essayist and novelist Susan Sontag.

Moser dug deep to show the complexity and contradictions of this woman. I can't remember who said that holding two contradictory concepts in the mind suggests adulthood. I am not sure that is the case, as with many, and Sontag, those contradictions are 'the child' and 'the adult'. Far more vulnerable than perceived from the outside, and this vulnerability leading, in later life especially, to show more bullying behaviour to those around her she was meant to love.

Unquestionably a fine if occasionally flawed mind. Time to revisit some of her essays. show less