Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag

By Sigrid Nunez (Author)

Susan Sontag was forty-three years old and already a major American writer and thinker when Sigrid Nunez first met her, in 1976. While recovering from cancer surgery, Sontag hired Nunez, who had recently finished graduate school, to type her correspondence. She introduced Nunez to her son, and the two began dating. At the time, mother and son shared an apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side, which soon became Nunez's home as well. Described by Nunez as "a natural mentor," who considered educating others both a moral obligation and a source of endless pleasure, Sontag inevitably infected those around her with her many cultural and intellectual passions. Her influence on Nunez would be profound, and Nunez looks back with gratitude for, among other things, having had, as an early model, "someone who held such an exalted, unironic view of the writer's vocation."

An intimate portrait of one of America's most esteemed cultural figures, during a time when her life was both at a peak of success and unusually turbulent, this work of memory is also a deeply felt work of homage. For a young woman who yearned to become a writer, Nunez tells us, meeting Susan Sontag was "one of the luckiest strokes of my life."

Item Number: B8199

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Product Information:
Year: 2011
140 pages
HC, 7" x 5"

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