Sonnenberg, Susanna 1965- (Susanna Sophia Sonnenberg)

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Sonnenberg, Susanna 1965- (Susanna Sophia Sonnenberg)

PERSONAL:

Born September 9, 1965, in London, England; married; husband's name Christopher; children: two sons. Education: Graduated from university.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Missoula, MT. Office—Molly Friedrich, Friedrich Agency, 136 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022.

CAREER:

Writer.

WRITINGS:

(Contributor) Jessica Berger Gross, editor, About What Was Lost: Twenty Writers on Miscarriage, Healing, and Hope, Plume (New York, NY), 2006.

Her Last Death (memoir), Scribner (New York, NY), 2008.

Contributor to periodicals, including Elle, Parenting, and O magazine.

SIDELIGHTS:

Susanna Sonnenberg, who was born in London, England, on September 9, 1965, grew up in New York to fairly wealthy parents and graduated from college. She later married, moved to Missoula, Montana, and had two sons. She began working as a freelance writer, contributing stories and articles to Elle, Parenting, and O magazine. Her experiences with her sociopathic mother, however, did not follow the typical lifestyle of someone with her background.

This prompted Sonnenberg to publish a memoir in 2008 called Her Last Death. In it Sonnenberg outlines how her mother would shower her and her younger sister with love one minute and then anger the next. Sonnenberg recalls how on her sixteenth birthday, her mother gave her a nice pen for her writing projects and a gram of cocaine that she had proudly cut herself. Her mother would seduce her male friends and their siblings and would openly discuss sex with her young daughters. Sonnenberg naturally developed with a stinted view of life, love, and intimacy, recording in the memoir how she had sex with virtually anybody. Her mother's hysteria and constant craving to be the center of attention in her daughters' lives drove the family apart. The final time, of many, Sonnenberg heard that her mother was dying, she decided to cut her ties and close the relationship by publishing this account.

Terry Miller Shannon, reviewing the book on Bookreporter. com, recorded that the memoir "is in many ways an unsettling read, partly because of the matter-of-fact tone in which Sonnenberg relates her mother's manipulation and abuses. It is also a page-turner, as the reader hopes for resolution, healing and resurrection for the author, who leaves us with a satisfying, not overly neat, conclusion." A critic writing in Texas's Sulphur Springs News-Telegram did not recommend Sonnenberg's memoir "for the faint of heart or the easily offended," appending that "her ability to tell her story with a precision-like insight is true testament to the triumph of the human spirit." The same critic stated: "It's been a long time since a personal memoir moved me like Susanna Sonnenberg's." Barbara Liss, writing in the Houston Chronicle, described the memoir as "an exhausting read." Liss summarized: "My guess is Sonnenberg's refusal to play again the audience for her mother's hospital scene set the wheels in motion for the book. Less poetically but more to the point, she might have called this project ‘101 Reasons Why I Didn't Rush to My Mother's Bedside.’ Every episode builds her argument, justifying her estrangement from a narcissistic parent—and from a younger sister who never forgave her for staying away."

A contributor to the Blog Critics Web site relayed that "reading this book is like driving by a traffic accident. It seems almost indecent to share in such intimate things, yet your attention is irresistibly drawn to Sonnenberg's story." Carolyn See, reviewing the book in the Washington Post, claimed that "reading Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg has been like spending three days in a monkey house." New York Times Book Review, contributor Michiko Kakutani wrote that the author's writing style, which avoids trying to classify her mother's illnesses "makes, at times, for a curiously opaque narrative, but it also intensifies the immediacy of Ms. Sonnenberg's story, plunging readers into a sort of perpetual present tense in which we are made to experience, almost firsthand, the inexplicable and perverse behavior of an impossible woman from the point of view of her aghast, bedazzled—and immensely gifted—daughter." Megan O'Grady, writing in Vogue, found that "this scrupulously unsentimental writer saves her keenest narrative powers for conveying her mother's increasingly erratic behavior, and the heartbreak of a young girl's innocence eclipsed." Booklist contributor Joanne Wilkinson noted that "what's perhaps most moving about this painful memoir is Sonnenberg's determination to live a normal life." A contributor to Publishers Weekly claimed that the author's "story is titillating, and her writing is strong and clear."