Her Last Death: A Memoir | 
 enlarge | Author: Susanna Sonnenberg
Publisher: Scribner
Category: EBooks
List Price: $15.00
Buy New: $9.99
You Save: $5.01 (33%)
Rating:  84 reviews
Sales Rank: 24275
Format: Kindle Book
Media: Kindle Edition
Edition: 1st Scribner Hardcover Ed
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.29092
Publication Date: January 1, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Amazon.com Review
Susanna's mother gave her a copy of Penthouse when she was a ten-year-old, cocaine when she was 12, and seduced her boyfriend at 14. Sonnenberg recounts "the true calamity of being daughter to this mother." The glory of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and somehow navigated her way to a deftly written book capturing her dismantled youth. The daughter of a glamorous, falling-down addict of a mother and a gifted, self-absorbed father, Sonnenberg never falls into the trap of attempting to analyze two people never meant to be parents. Instead, we are allowed to feel the strange and powerful familial currencies running between mother and daughter through the keenly observed writing of Sonnenberg. The writing is razor-sharp and raw, a significant feat considering the untethered early years of this immensely talented writer. --Molly Jay
Product Description
Her Last Death begins as the phone rings early one morning in the Montana house where Susanna Sonnenberg lives with her husband and two young sons. Her aunt is calling to tell Susanna her mother is in a coma after a car accident. She might not live. Any daughter would rush the thousands of miles to her mother's bedside. But Susanna cannot bring herself to go. Her courageous memoir explains why. Glamorous, charismatic and a compulsive liar, Susanna's mother seduced everyone who entered her orbit. With outrageous behavior and judgment tinged by drug use, she taught her child the art of sex and the benefits of lying. Susanna struggled to break out of this compelling world, determined, as many daughters are, not to become her mother. Sonnenberg 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. Her Last Death is riveting, disarming and searingly beautiful.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 79 more reviews...
 Very Good Summer Read! June 29, 2009
Maureen Sandusky (Bourbonnais, IL)
I read this book in a few days. It was very good. There was never a point where it seemed to drag on, every chapter was interesting. I liked this book because it is a unique topic and unlike any other book I have read. I think the only way to describe this book is fascinating.
 Overindulgent June 19, 2009
M. Green (KCMO)
Upon first glance I was drawn to this memoir for the story, the childhood it represented and the possibility of normality after such. It seemed intriguing and genuine from preliminary evaluation.
However upon reading it was mindless, offensive, and in many parts just downright ridiculous. There were parts hardly believable, and while the author does state she is the only "real" character, the other characters were shameless, boring and just as self encompassed as the author. The portrayal of the husband was complacent, and the relationship with her son at times was disturbing.
The story was incomplete and just overindulgent chatter on one woman's road to some kind of self discovery; to be honest at the conclusion of my reading I was still unclear as to what that self discovery was.
Highlighter-Worthy June 4, 2009
M. Vitale (NY)
I am not the sort of person that highlights passages in books. I think about doing it from time to time, when a particular turn-of-phrase strikes a chord in me. I read this book on my Kindle, and I actually took the time to use the semi-clumsy highlighting function to save the multitude of segments that seared into me.
The narcissism of Susanna's mother was all too familiar and her sexual acting-out as a result could have been yanked from my own diaries. There are dramatic differences from my own life (the mother's drug addiction, the money) but those are just the trappings of particular generations and circumstance. The psychology of these two is what is key to this story, and it inspires me once again to write my own.
I read this book on an 11 hour flight from Istanbul to NY. My "entertainment system" was out of order, and I couldn't have cared less.
 Sorry I read it. May 12, 2009
A. Glynn (Long Island, NY)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I thought the book jumped all over the place, too much going on, and I hated all of the characters. I just finished it because I wanted to know if her mother does die.
Mediocre at Best May 11, 2009
C. Millstone (Pleasantville(jk))
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Like many other readers, I never found the mother that atrocious. I mean, sure, she did have some bizarre and harmful behavior. However, I don't see her as the ravaging beast that Sonnenberg describes her as. She was a coke addict which caused her to be in the hospital a lot and sometimes to go into hysterical fits. While this would definitely be scary, Sonnenberg doesn't describe her mother's frequent hospital visits as frightening but more as expected inconveniences. She definitely wasn't physically abused considering most parents give some form of minimal corporal punishment. The verbal abuse was certainly there but not to the point of traumatizing Sonnenberg, more to the point of making it difficult for her to get along with her mother. Although Sonnenberg's mother has an interesting personality as a histrionic and her overly sexual behavior, I really don't believe that her story was interesting enough to warrant an entire memoir. In fact, at times, I felt Sonnenberg's story ( her affair with the English teacher) was more interesting than her mother's and that she used her own story to fill in gaps in which nothing significant happened with her mother.
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