Her Last Death: A Memoir by Susanna SonnenbergAfter learning of her mother’s fatal car accident, Susanna Sonnenberg decides she will not go to the hospital to say goodbye and watch her die. “I am afraid my mother will die. I am afraid she won’t.” Her reaction seems atypical, and throughout her memoir, Her Last Death, Sonnenberg describes a childhood that would solicit such a response.
The story begins in a New York townhouse with her mother, father, and younger sister. After only a few years, Sonnenberg’s parents divorce and she and her sister live with their mother, Daphne. Daphne buys Penthouse magazine for eight-year-old Sonnenberg, gives her a gram of coke for her sixteenth birthday, has sex with several of Sonnenberg’s ex-boyfriends, and tells unending lies to feed her addiction to painkillers and cocaine.
Throughout the book and Sonnenberg’s life, the dysfunction remains. The reader meets a calloused Sonnenberg as she relates an extraordinary childhood and her struggle to find normalcy. Her tone allows an honest and intimate portrait while keeping the reader at a distance. Similar to diaries I kept as an elementary student, it is an observation of events and relationships without much personal reflection. Unfortunately, Sonnenberg never allows the reader to connect with her struggle and pain as Daphne repeatedly fails her. The frankness with which she relays the story leaves it flat.
The account offers the reader, and perhaps more importantly, Sonnenberg, justification for leaving her mother to die. However, her mother’s physical death merely punctuates the finality of a terminally ill mother-daughter relationship.
Review by Adriel Gorsuch, Indigo Editing, LLC
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9108-8
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Pub. Date: January 2008
Hardcover $24.00
