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Susanna Sonnenberg on Her Last Death

7:46 AM PST, February 14, 2008, updated at 11:39 AM PST, February 14, 2008

Susanna Sonnenberg's critically-lauded memoir, Her Last Death, begins as the phone rings early one morning and the author learns her mother is in a coma after a car accident and may not live. But Susanna cannot bring herself to go to her mother's bedside. Her courageous, searing memoir mines tender and startling memories as she writes of her fierce resolve to forge her independence, to become a woman capable of trust, and to be a good mother to her own children.

I recently caught up with Susanna to ask about life after a published memoir.

Amazon.com: You follow a rich family tradition of writing memoirs steeped in eccentricity. Did you feel pressure to follow the familial literary path?

SS: My father, stepmother and grandfather all wrote memoirs. My stepmother has written two, both wonderful. She's taught me a lot about the difference between recounting a life and telling a story. It’s the story that’s important, if you're going to ask a reader to pay attention to it. So you better think really carefully about the way of telling. I never felt pressure to follow, but the anxiety of influence is another matter! I made a point of not looking at my father's beautiful memoir at all while I was writing mine.

Amazon.com: You received the holy grail of publishing when the legendarily unforgiving Michiko Kakutani gave you a near-mythological rave review in The New York Times. Did you feel like you'd come full circle? That you'd achieved the sweet redemption you'd been chasing for so long?

SS: Kakutani's vivid understanding of what I was trying to do with each element I had chosen for the book -- I was overwhelmed, and so grateful. Not simply for the positive review, which felt wonderful, but for the care she took in seeing and respecting the book as a whole -- the subject, the story, the themes and the author. The day the review appeared my half-sister gave birth to a daughter, so it was a tremendous and emotional day. A great day.

Amazon.com: I imagine this book was written in your own mind for years. What was the trigger that gave you the courage to put pen to paper? How long did it take to write and what did the final sentence feel like?

SS: I'd been writing personal essays for magazines for a couple of years, starting with a piece for Elle about choosing abortion. I remember feeling that the only way to get at the exhausting center of the issue was to go right to the personal experience of living life: This is how life is, messy, filled with holes and dark spots and missteps and knowing and ambivalence and, most of all, a private truth that doesn't need to have a bearing on the rest of the world. We are, coherently and intensely, our private truths.

My Elle editor had been asking me to write about the crazy sexual messages I had grown up with and how they had impacted my marriage. I resisted a long time. I really didn't want to face whatever it was going to bring up. I started to figure out, though, that what I didn’t want to write was probably the thing I had to write. I gave her the essay, and a few weeks later, I woke up at 4 am, and the whole book presented itself. It was the closest thing I'd ever had to an epiphany. But I know that unconsciously I had been preparing that book a long, long time.

I spent about 15 months writing and was very fortunate to have so much support from my husband, who pretty much let me have eight hours a day alone, who said, "Yes, go to writing colonies." That’s not easy when you have small children, and I know that my boys made sacrifices too in order for me to write the book. I'm very grateful.

The final sentence of Her Last Death is written in the future tense, contains my whole beautiful family, and joy. I wanted it to hold some unknowing but also illuminate an extraordinary foundation. I had thought the last sentence would be bigger, somehow, more intentionally poetic. But that's what came, and that was right. I still cry when I read that sentence aloud because it represents, truly, what I was trying to make of my life, and of my sons' lives.

Amazon.com: In the author's note, you write "I have changed all names but my own to emphasize that this story could only be mine." This statement has caused some confusion for readers . . . as this is a memoir, can you explain why you did this?

SS: Memoir came under scrutiny and attack during the time I was working on the book. James Frey lied, and suddenly this called every memoir into question, or every recent memoir. But what was the question? "Is this true?" I felt a sense of frustration and outrage that people started to look for newspaper reporting when they picked up a memoir. The form has never been that -- it's deeply impressionistic. And isn't that what we look to artists for? A new rendering, a unique voice in a common conversation. Art should always give us something to see that we couldn't have defined before. At the beginning of Speak, Memory Nabokov describes his "awakening of consciousness as a series of spaced flashes, with the intervals between them gradually diminishing until bright blocks of perception are formed, affording memory a slippery hold." He acknowledges that each consciousness is acute and unique, in possession of its own "bright blocks." And he's going to write them down. I also love memory's fallibility implied in Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales, which is memoir: He writes, "I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six." Thus, the two versions are both true and untrue at the same time. I guess I felt that I needed to make absolutely clear how deeply I revered the form of memoir, what a fascinating, personal expression it is. By definition, memoir is eccentric, to use your word.

Amazon.com: You're a mother now. Do you worry about the day when your own two sons are old enough to read the memoir and absorb such graphic details of your past?

SS: This question seems to be one of the most pressing to people who read Her Last Death. How can she write this when she knows her boys might read it? Well, first of all, they are 11 and 7, and we don't let them see R-rated movies, and we wouldn't let them read an R-rated book. Second, children have a healthy, intuitive resistance to their parents' sex lives. Think about your mother and father having sex, and you instantly think, "Oh, yuck." My father's memoir included parts of his sexual history, and I sort of glossed over them. I was still able to appreciate the book, and him; I just didn't need to know that stuff. What's interesting to me in this discussion is that the idea of a mother having a sexual self can really activate people. Do male writers who write about sex get asked this question? I wonder if anyone asked my father. Of course, Her Last Death is largely concerned with the tension inherent in a mother's sexual self. In my childhood, sex was the language of mothering -- which is why sex needed to be such a prominent character in the telling of this mother-daughter story -- if she'd been obsessed with taxidermy, I might have written in a language of animals, fur, pelts, embalming. My mother's interests were sexual, her touch sexual, her need to sexualize everything deeply confusing. And this is very different than a mother having a sexual self. It was a kind of sexual psychosis. I have worked hard to learn the distinction between appropriate and inappropriate information with my children. I hope that should they choose to read the book -- and they very well may not choose to -- they will respect how I told a certain story.

Amazon.com: You write "This is a work of memory and subject to the imperfections of memory. I have been faithful to what I remember, and people in my family may remember shared experiences differently." Has that been the case?

SS: Of course. I mean, not that anyone has challenged me, but of course different things matter to other people. No two people observe the same details, imbue the same details with the exact same meaning. We have our respective filters. Let's say my sister and I went to the movies. One of us might remember the day because it was her first glimpse of Al Pacino and she fell for him; one of us might have felt nauseous from too much popcorn and would remember worrying she was going to throw up in the taxi on the way home. Same day, same events, sitting side by side. What's important to you comes to the foreground, and the rest falls away.

Amazon.com: You were a young teenager when much of the material in this book was taking place. You popped Valium for stomach pains. Your mother wore a coke spoon around her neck, slept with boys more age-appropriate for you, gave you a gram of coke for your 16th birthday, and prompted you to read letters aloud to her from Penthouse. Did you realize at the time that this was incredibly improper behavior, or did these actions seem natural at the time, given they were coming from your own mother?

SS: As a child, I wouldn't have known how to think "improper." My mother defined the world, and I accepted it. If anything, I believed it was exciting. It made us special, apart from everyone else. Specialness was very important in my family. It was something you strived for. But as I became a teenager I started to recognize the chaos of it all, although I don't think I could have named it at the time.

Amazon.com: You wrote "She wanted a certain daughter of me, and I wanted a certain mother, our standoff." What is the current status of your relationship with your mother? Has she read the book?

SS: We aren't in touch.

Amazon.com: You seem to have created a life for yourself as far away as possible from your past. You live in Missoula, Montana where you have worked for an abortion clinic and have written for the local papers. You certainly seem to have created your own destiny. Is there any part of you that misses the bygone shimmery patina?

SS: I'll always feel a happy thrill in elegant hotel lobbies, in well-appointed restaurants. That's in my bones. And I wish I could share some of the beautiful places of my past with my kids, like my grandmother's Barbados estate. But these things don't really matter to me when it comes to the day-to-day concerns of being part of a community, of connecting with the natural world and of raising my sons to be good men.

Amazon.com: Has enough time passed now that some humor has seeped into some of your history and memory? Is the past a source of resentment or are there moments when you can find laughter?

SS: I can see a certain insane comedy in it all, but I don’t treat it in a cavalier way anymore. Writing all this down forced me to examine my feelings and experiences in depth, especially the great pain in such a violent rupture with my own mother. I don't feel resentful, largely because I have finally be able to draw creative strength from all this. A long part of my life was lived in anger, which isn't a very useful emotion. Dominating, but not useful. I feel more open now, easier. The pain, if anything, is more accessible, but it’s also better integrated into who I am, and acceptance is a huge part of peace.

--Molly

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