Susanna Sonnenberg

Found this book at a thrift store for a buck. Got my money's worth and then some. Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir, HER LAST DEATH, documents a horrific childhood with a mother who was a sociopathic liar and could go from cooing and loving one moment to screaming and punching the next. The author's mother was married at 16, and after a couple of miscarriages, had Susanna at age 19. Addicted to cocaine, painkillers, tranquilizers and pretty much whatever she could shoot up, snort or swallow, show more mother 'Daphne' was probably also schizophrenic. I would say 'functioning' - but standards prevent that. Sonnenberg's beautiful, sociopath mother was married multiple times and involved in many short-lived relationships. Sonnenberg absorbed all of these bad examples growing up and became sexually active herself at an early age, engaging in an unhealthy long-term relationship with a married teacher thirty years older than she. Multiple affairs and pickup one-nighters followed after her college years. Her problematic relationship with her mother continued, but in her late twenties the author finally found herself in a stable relationship and realized the truth and the depth of her mother's problems.

Married, Sonnenberg endures the heartbreak of aborting an unplanned pregnancy, an experience that leaves her devastated, and she becomes a post-abortion counselor at the same clinic. At thirty, Sonnenberg finally grows up, learns something about responsibility and parenthood. She cannot stop loving her mother, but she can finally understand the damage that her mother's lifelong erratic and sociopathic behavior has done, and weans herself off that influence.

This is a compelling page-turner of a memoir, one that probably would appeal to most women. My reaction to this intimate look at one woman's screwed up life? Well, WHEW! I can see why it was a bestseller. I'm almost embarrassed to say it was hard to put down, but that's the truth. Sonnenberg is a damn good writer. Yeah, I'll recommend it. show less

Her Last Death is Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir of her rocky history with her mother. It starts in what we are to take as the present when Sonnenberg has finally settled down to family life with her husband and two boys in Montana. It's there that she gets the call that her mother has been seriously injured in car accident, and it speaks volumes from the start that when she receives the call, she doesn't believe it's true. Sonnenberg faces the choice of whether to rush to what could be her show more mother's deathbed or not. At its heart, Her Last Death is, perhaps, an excuse for why she eventually couldn't bring herself to go. As Sonnenberg unpacks her memories of her effusive, overbearing mother who was addicted to painkillers, cocaine, and sex, who lied without a second thought, who stole her teenage boyfriends, who introduced her to cocaine at a young age, readers will find themselves ultimately sympathetic and disgusted with both mother and daughter.

I didn't love Her Last Death, but there is that certain something about it that drew me in. Sonnenberg's writing is fluid and draws out the essence of her twisted childhood with skill. Well-chosen anecdotes are strung together to reveal the dynamic of a dangerous mother-daughter relationship. Sonnenberg actively loathes her mother, loves her, is frightened by her, is disgusted by her and is impressed by her. She wants to hold her mother at a distance but has a daughter's desire to share her biggest news with her mother even if she knows hurt will follow every time she makes a connection. Sonnenberg's memoir captivates with the same power of an Augusten Burroughs memoir, not because it's so enjoyable, but because it's well written and simply hard to look away from these train wrecks of lives so well depicted.

I was enthralled by Sonnenberg's depiction of her early childhood with her wildly unpredictable mother. However, as Sonnenberg herself grows to adulthood, having affairs with married teachers and escaping into meaningless sex, I lost much of what sympathy I had for her which made the latter half of the book a bigger challenge. I was often disgusted by her behavior and unwilling to believe that her mother was at the root of the problem, which seems to be her desired angle. Certainly, a bad mother can damage a child, but at some point, the child grows up and has to take responsibility for her own actions which it seemed to take Sonnenberg an awful long time to do. Her Last Death is a fascinating and well-told story of a relationship, indeed it often is a well-balanced account of a mother's pros and cons, but when readers begin to lose sympathy for the memoirist, Her Last Death loses its bite. show less

Following the author through a dizzying array of shallow friendships made me feel like a voyeur. Watching her inhabit and shed relationships felt like gazing into another woman's closet. Friends come and go, like dresses purchased on sale at the height of fashion and later abandoned when they no longer fit.

I picked up Susanna Sonnenberg’s memoir Her Last Death in the bargain bin at Border’s and it was one of my better finds among the myriad of books.
The book opens with a phone call in which that Sonnenberg learns that her mother, who lives in Barbados, has been in a horrible car accident, and there is a good chance she is going to die. The story is about her decision to not go to her mother and why. There is too much history, too many lies, too many faked illnesses and almost deception show more about dying. She just can’t go through it again. Her real life, with her husband and sons, has weight and meaning, but her mother fictional life just wasn’t Sonnenberg’s real life anymore.
The book continues to tell the story of Sonnenberg’s manifestation of what she believes her life was like with her mother. Her mother is addicted to painkillers, has a cocaine habit, engages in uncontrolled, irresponsible sex tryst’s, and could almost certainly be diagnosed with a mental health disorder. Growing up at a young age, Susy how her mother lost her virginity, watches her mother having sex with a stream of bizarre men, and learns that sex is power and money equals independence.
Susy has a very early strong interest in sex and she becomes fascinated with Penthouse magazines and almost fanatical with the development of her body and masturbation. Her mother acknowledges and condones Susy’s problem telling her simply “Go on, my little pervert. We have no secrets.”
When this behavior extends into Susy’s life during college and in the early years of her adulthood, it really becomes quite exasperating. She is used to being used, to feeling empty, to lying and being lied to, and it seems that she is going to continue the cycle her mother modeled so graphically.
Her Last Death is ultimately about the buoyancy of the individual spirit; it is also about how strongly the messages we collect as children profile our outlook. Sonnenberg’s writing is immediate and razor-sharp. She pulls you into her experiences and her point of view from the very first page, and she is not afraid to confront those topics that are upsetting, complex, and illicit.
It is really hard for me to judge this book as a like or a dislike because I felt sorry for Susy from the first page. The book touched subjects usually left alone by authors. I am giving this book five stars because of the way it evoked such emotion and how well written it was.
5 Stars show less