Her Last Death: A Memoir Reviews

• The best memoir I've ever read.

  
  By A1MELOXQKIQBJC on 2007-12-14
  From the first sentence I was hooked, and I spent the next many hours immersed in a world that is alternatingly horrifying, entrancing, illuminating, and darker than night--much like Daphne, the author's mother and the subject of this book. In the hands of a less accomplished writer, "Her Last Death" could have been a sensationalistic, simplistic shocker, but the prose is so gorgeous and Sonnenberg's control over the material so complete, the book is simply irresistible. One can only hope that this isn't "her last book."
  
  

• Warning - There is Much That is Distasteful and Offensive Here

  
  By A1ZKGSDVP057L9 on 2008-03-04
  Spoiler alert: There is so much in this book that some of you might find truly ugly, I'm going to have to write a warning review.
  
  I was going along with this story as best as I could manage with all the promiscuous and pointless sex, both from the mother and the daughter. It was shocking and ugly when the mother kept sleeping with the daughter's friends -- although later we find out this may or may not have happened at all.
  
  Then it got very distasteful when the daughter begins an affair with her high school teacher, right under his wife's nose. People get arrested for behavior like this, and the wife, when she finds out, seems to accept it. Women's lib takes a giant step backward.
  
  We have a brief interlude of Susanna sleeping with the same men as her sister, and then she finds her true love, and they get a puppy. Here's where I nearly put the book down for good. The puppy bites so they have it euthanized. Wow, that's brutal, but it gets worse. She gets pregnant, and after one day of pretending they're happy about it and one day of pretending they're going to abort it, the husband votes to abort it and she does it! Even though she doesn't want to! Women's lib takes another giant step backward. Now I am really disgusted. This woman has put down a puppy and a baby within a couple of chapters. Then just a few months later, the husband decides NOW he's ready to be a father. Meanwhile, Susanna gets a part-time job as a counselor at an abortion clinic, so we get to wallow in the misery and horror of that. (So if you believe in saving puppies and babies and not seducing teenagers, you're going to hate this book.)
  
  This is one damaging, nasty family. The mother is a liar, drug addict and nymphomaniac and carries on sexually in front of her two daughters like a latter day Britney Spears, and the daughters turn out no better, except we're supposed to like Susanna at the end when she mothers two little boys, keeps her marriage together, and lives on a budget in Montana. And who cares if she doesn't go visit her mother in the Bahamas after she has a car accident (and incidentally, doesn't die, so I don't understand the title. I wouldn't spend the money to visit her either.)
  
  Sonnenberg is a "writer," and I put that in quotes because she writes like someone trying a little too hard to be a writer. This trashy life is told in overly genteel, descriptive prose and although she realizes this kind of life is not normal, I have a hard time seeing her as a victim, and even now, you can't be sure she believes her own behavior was as ugly as her mother's. If all this was going on in a trailer park instead of luxury New York condos, it'd be just trash.
  
  It almost seems like a B movie, it's so over the top. Even the adulterous history teacher she had the affair with dies a horrible cancer death, like a 1950s movie retribution. I'm not going to be surprised when this does become a movie starring.....who? Too bad Shirley MacLaine is too old to play the mother now.
  
  My other frustration is both mother and the daughters are always judging men on whether they're good in bed, but not once is it explained what the definition of good in bed is. By what standard are they judging? And the three women are positive they are excellent in bed, so terrific, they can get anyone they want...and they do. And I'm not sure how they're doing this either except making themselves absolutely available for sex wherever whenever with whomever. What makes them good lovers? Sonnenberg doesn't share, so you don't even learn a trick or two from this ghastly story. And yes, we have a lesbian episode, too.
  
  So, in summary, if you have problems with any of these topics, don't read this book:
  Mothers and daughters sharing lovers
  High school teachers seducing their students
  Dogs with behavior problems being euthanized
  Abortion
  
  

• Others have done this much better....

  
  By A7QSUBTGCE11P on 2008-01-06
  The superlatives in some of the reviews have me shaking my head. Haven't these people read the wonderful, beautifully written biographies and memoirs of the past few years? This book is disjointed, just quick vignettes of abuse (mental, chemical)by unappealing people with no values or common sense. I bought this for our retirement home's library--we have many highly literate, educated, adventurous residents who read all types of books--but I find this book so poorly written and depressing it is going into the Dumpster, not on the shelf. Read Liza Campbell's story! Read Augusten Burroughs! Jeannette Walls! Pass on this one...
  
  

• Haunting portrait of hell

  
  By A18VICK1AMJS6B on 2008-02-11
  It's been a long time since a personal memoir stayed with me for so long after I turned the last page.
  
  Sonnenberg is living proof that money and privilege don't insure happiness ... or even a glimpse at normalcy.
  
  Sonnenberg's grandfather was one of New York City's most successful publicity machines. Her father was somewhat of a literary star, especially during the 1960s. He grew up in one of the city's most recognizable mansions, The Fish House, at 19 Gramercy Park South. He had a fling with Susanna's mother when she was 15, got her pregnant and married her when she was 16.
  
  Sonnenberg's maternal roots are just as impressive, even though she changes their names, so we can't Google them for more background. Her maternal grandfather was a successful musician and wrote tunes for the movies. Her grandmother could have been Carole Lombard's twin. After the two divorced, 'Patsy,' as Sonneberg calls her, had houses in Barbados, London and Monte Carlo.
  
  Forget Joan Crawford and the wire hangers. 'Daphne' was addicted to drugs, sex and rock 'n rollers. If Sonnenberg has written the truth, it's a wonder Daphne survived her addiction to morphine, cocaine, Valium and percodan, not to mention her binge drinking. She was hospitalized for mental meltdowns on numerous occasions. She taught Sonnenberg how to give her drugs with needles. When Sonnenberg was 12, Daphne gave the child cocaine, telling her it was important for her to know the difference between quality cocaine and powder that had been "cut," or watered down. Daphne seduced her daughter's boyfriends. She had sex on Daphne's bed at boarding school. She punched her daughter in the stomach, a lot.
  
  And, there was really no one to protect the young, sensitive girl from the maniac that had given her life.
  
  How Sonnenberg ever found her way through the mania to a healthy relationship is a miracle. Now living in Missoula, Montana, with a loving husband and two young boys, she has written a glorious accounting of her time in hell. Her ability to tell her story with a precision-like insight is true testament to the triumph of the human spirit.
  
  Warning: This book is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended. Daphne's drug use is just the tip of the iceberg. Until her marriage, Sonnenberg used her sexuality to get what she wanted and to fill the gaping holes in her heart. She was promiscuous. It's a wonder she wasn't an alcoholic or druggie to boot.
  
  I suspect this book will garner a lot of attention come awards season and I'm sure Hollywood will scarf it up, even if the screenplay would have to be rated X.
  
  
  
  

• A MUST READ

  
  By A12L8VMJFIRQSA on 2007-12-28
  This is the most courageous and riveting memoir I've ever read. The author unflinchingly recounts the details of her traumatic and frequently disturbing upbringing. She allows us to see into the life of a financially privileged, yet emotionally and physically abusive family where anything goes. She bravely shares her own darkest moments in her journey to free herself from the pattern of histrionic behavior that has been the norm for her entire life. It is a triumphant and inspiring story of a chronically codependent mother-daughter relationship. An absolute must-read.
  
  
• What kind of daughter doesn't go to her mother's deathbed? This one. Cheer for her.
  By A1725KPO7A5ULX on 2008-02-05
  What kind of daughter gets the most dreaded of all phone calls --- "Your mother's been in an accident, she's probably going to die" --- and doesn't drop everything to rush to mom's bedside?
  
  In this case, a smart one.
  
  Eternal vigilance, someone said, is the price you pay for not turning into your parents. And that's for garden-variety neurotic folk like you and me. For the kids of parents who should never have become parents --- the hard core druggies, the passionate narcissists, the spoiled rotten rich --- it's much harder. To hear the stories those kids tell is to wonder: Why didn't you self-destruct?
  
  Of these horror stories, Susanna Sonnenberg's is a stunner. "It's official --- the worst mother, ever," one reviewer wrote, and I don't disagree. Susanna's mother abuses drugs so casually she mixes them with tap water before injecting her thigh, encourages her single-digit-aged daughter to masturbate, seduces (or pretends to) her kid's boyfriends. That she shamelessly drops names and makes her sick self the center of every conversation --- in this family, that's not even a misdemeanor.
  
  The father's no peach, either. He becomes afflicted with multiple sclerosis, which buys him some slack later on, but he's already done his share of damage. Just one example: How do you justify taking your grade-school daughter to the movies and blaming her for doing nothing when a guy gropes her?
  
  I say it all the time: We become what we behold. It doesn't matter what our parents tell us, we imprint who and what they are. So what are the odds that Susanna's teen years are about school and extra-curricular activities and making sure she gets into a good college?
  
  Good guess.
  
  Readers who don't like to read about lovemaking-without-love should stay clear of this book, because there's a ton of it here. And not just the mother. Susanna gets off to what, in her family, is a slow start, but by 16 she's doing it with her English teacher, and in her early 20s, she sleeps with anyone who crosses her path.
  
  So, you ask, what's in this squalor for me?
  
  First, redemption. Many of us believe that people don't change. But the last half of "Her Last Death" chronicles Susanna Sonnenberg's path from talented loser to wife and mother of two. It's not a pretty story --- there's backsliding galore --- but it's credible, and moving, and surely an inspiration to anyone who's lost and thinks there's no way out of the hole.
  
  And then there's the writing. Susanna Sonnenberg puts you in the room and keeps you in the room. And something harder: She doesn't step back and judge. Was her mother bipolar? Reads like it. But Sonnenberg is too good a writer to turn her book into a tract about a woman who needed help and a family and culture that didn't know enough to provide it. And because she doesn't judge, we never catch a break. We're in it with her, begging her not to get engaged to the gambler who doesn't love her, willing her to break up with the chilly and controlling Brit, praying that she doesn't lose her first good relationship by confessing a meaningless lesbian affair.
  
  Funny thing. Susanna Sonnenberg's grandfather --- the source of the money that started the chain of indulgence and sickness --- was Benjamin Sonnenberg, who more or less invented public relations in America. He commanded huge fees for expert spin; you could say that deception was the family business. Generations later, his granddaughter has told her story as harsh truth. Good for her.
  
  
  
• Don't Waste Your Time
  By A1I7MMM75FY3HN on 2008-01-27
  This book was published because of the authors last name and her connection to the literary world. The characters are underdeveloped and the writing is largely disjointed. We leap from the hustle and bustle of NYC to quickly meeting future husband and moving to Montana to have a Lesbian affair and pole vault into marraige with the guy after a literary retreat. Just too many hiccups. There are freqeunt gaps and what feels like years of missing information summed up by listing several daliances grocery style. I find the memoir more like an expose from a tabloid rag rather then a piece of literary excellence.
  
  
• Haunting but aloof
  By A1S9C85ZB2BRQU on 2008-01-07
  This memoir was less a memoir than I would have liked. Many characters were virtually undeveloped and thrown in there with little significance (esp. most of her family members). The disclaimer in the front of the book made me think of A MILLION LITTLE PIECES and I assume the vagueness, the lack of naming places or describing people left me suspicious about the author's validity. I understand that memoir has evolved to straddle the line between fiction and non-fiction and it can be a slippery slope in terms of legal matters. I got the sense that the author did not want to "out" her family members, but if you are going to be writing in this highly personal genre about family relationships, a reader hopes for a little more clarity. The way this work is presented, makes me feel that if the author chose to publish this as a work of fiction, she would have been able to create a much richer story and ultimately that is what a great read is all about. While I did think it was quite haunting and compelling on some level, it was also disjointed and slightly repetitive. There is the section near the end of the book about her abortion that seems to have been cut and pasted from another piece that she wrote for some other publication. In general, it was uneven but engaging in areas.
  
  
• Powerful
  By A2L2K2ZBRZXTHR on 2008-01-13
  Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir is powerful and moving. It reports fairly on the drama and grandiosity of youth as well as on the difficulty of knowing oneself with a mother who refuses you room to exist. It also touches on the frightening flip side of a difficulty in valuing oneself--a need for a constant valuable image of oneself that one can consume. The need is primal and intoxicating and holds out the promise of wholeness. The absolute failure of that promise is what is both sad and empowering about this memoir.
  
  You can feel Sonnenberg's fear of becoming her rapacious mother coexisting with a need to be seen which has only been granted at uncertain intervals throughout her life. What is most difficult about this book is that the spaces and rifts between loved ones continue to exist. It is painful to watch Sonnenberg try to tell her story to her sister and hear her sister's version (in which she can hear the hand of her mother) overwriting her own. It seems she remains unseen at every turn and we can feel how important it is to her to finally be with a man who will tell her what he sees and confirm what she sees.
  
  Sonnenerg's memoir is unsettling both for the way it minutely explores the carnage that ensues from manipulation, lies and an intrusive intimacy and for the answers it can't provide. In the end we don't know why two people can grow up in the same household and experience it so differently. The limits of subjectivity are insistent and painful, as much as the discord is intentionally sown. Her mother is so finally center stage (and you feel Sonnenberg's desire for and fear of her own toxic center stage throughout) that there is no way to circumvent her.
  
  Another reviewer has called the author selfish and I find that to be almost cruel after the number of times that selfishness has been confused with selfhood in Sonnenberg's upbringing. If anything the book is an exploration of the fragility of the lines drawn between our selves, of the weight of words and the unspoken pressure of need.
  
  The book is not for everyone, but it beautifully delineates some truths about the passage from adolescence to adulthood and the pervasive yet impersonal power of female sexuality. It also gives us pause to think more deeply about the parental relationship, in which, even if we set out with kind intentions, we take on mythical size.
  
  
  
• Oy, she lives on...
  By ANH8VL45X2L1S on 2008-02-04
  "Daphne" was truly the mother-from-hell. Narcissistic/drug addled/maybe bi-polar, this woman really should have been erased from the gene pool years ago. Susanna's memoir is well written and, thank god, the author has recovered from her upbringing.
  
  
• Awful Human Garbage - Spoilers
  By A24HTFUMCZES5U on 2008-03-25
  It is very rare that I will take the time to write a review on a book. In this case, however, I felt compelled to do so. I found the author to be one of the least sympathetic protagonists that I have ever read. The only possible joy that I have is that when she closes her eyes at night, she is tormented and agonizes over her miserable lie of a life. Not only does she sleep with just about everyone (ORTHODOX RABBI), she murders life with little regard to consequence. She has an abortion, kills her puppy, and can't be bothered to visit her dying mother or her dying first love. She then whines how maybe it wasn't the Queen Mary's final voyage that brought her to America.. it was another ocean liner that sailed many more times. WHO CARES. Her mother lied a lot and had a drug problem. She was promiscuous and may or may not have slept with her friends. Does this give any reason to live a life so vapid and self pitying? Oh.. I feel really bad for you. You travelled the globe and never had to want for money.. lived in mansions in Barbados and NYC.. and were given every possible leg up because of legacy and nothing that you earned for yourself. Boo hoo. I am certain that the only reason this pile of garbage was even published was that her last name was used to guarantee a contract.. maybe a favor to one of her deceased relatives. I've never seen an example of someone flying higher on borrowed wings, and then complaining the entire time about how bad she had it. My only hope is that her children read this book and decide to cut her out of their life when they get old enough to realize how selfish, self-pitying, and self absorbed she is. The only reason that I gave this book 2 stars is that it kept me awake with anger and compelled me to write a review of it. If you dislike people with a sense of entitlement, arrogance, and pity, avoid this book.
  
  
• good read
  By A3AA8FNT7NYOD7 on 2008-01-01
  really well drawn nutty mother character. Very entertaining, if you like stories about psychological child abuse
  
  
• Whoa is me and Whiner's memoir
  By A1FPJZ0AB9HPI2 on 2008-01-28
  .
  
  I was excitded to read this book after reading some positive reviews liken it to a truly excellent memoir, The Glass Castle.
  
  I found the authors tone both pitiful and annoying. The characters even the mother and daughter where both one dimensional and under developed.
  
  You never got a sense of why anyone was acting the way they were and the author failed to make it clear whether the mother was a pathological liar or telling the truth and had a grand life.
  
  I was very dissapointed in this book and what the author to pull herself together and stop sniveling.
  
  Its also depressing that she only finally found happiness by being with a man.
  
  I mean does she not see the irony?
  
  Dont buy this but check out the glass castle if you want to read about a truly horribel childhood and a woman who manages to make it on her own anyhow.
  
  
• Not Fun
  By AE00K5URC5ZE9 on 2008-02-19
  This book is down hill after the cover. I understand the basic premiss but it just doesn't pull it off . stay away from it
  
  
• A satisfying, not overly neat, conclusion
  By A2F6N60Z96CAJI on 2008-02-20
  Susanna Sonnenberg led a luxurious life as a child of privilege. When she was three years old, Bob Dylan lived next door. Susanna's parents divorced, and she moved to a deluxe New York hotel with mother Daphne and sister Penelope. Daphne drove a taxi, often bringing along her daughters in order to get bigger tips from fares. She began to date, was charismatic and popular, and had fabulous stories to tell, some of which were probably true.
  
  Daphne took six-year-old Susanna, along with Penelope, on a trip across the country. Along the way, she confided that she had stolen coats, sleeping bags and jewelry for their trip. She also told Susanna that she had leukemia and that she only had a few months to live. Susanna, horrified and sad, asked what would become of herself and Penelope after Daphne died. Daphne brushed off the question, telling her daughter that there was a good side to being terminal --- such as being able to charge anything on credit cards but never having to deal with the bills.
  
  When the trio returned to New York, Daphne informed Susanna that she didn't have leukemia after all; the hospital had mixed up patient charts. This just proved to be one of many of Daphne's uncountable, manipulative falsehoods. Meanwhile, Daphne seduces a married neighbor, Colin, but takes the girls on a vacation with Colin's best friend, Hugh.
  
  Although Susanna yearns to be closer to her father, Nat, he is emotionally distant with his daughters, suggesting they call him by his first name. Nat suffers the early stages of multiple sclerosis but manages to take the girls to cultural events. At one point, Susanna accompanies him to see Orson Welles films. He sternly tells his daughter not to speak until the movie has ended. As Nat watches the film, a man sits by Susanna, stroking her thigh. Afterward, when Susanna reveals to her father what happened, he simply tells her what to say next time: "Take your hands off me!" Nat considers the problem solved, but Susanna is sad that he doesn't act outraged or try to find her molester.
  
  As Susanna grows older, her mother's erratic behavior escalates. She abuses Susanna physically and emotionally, but these episodes are followed by interludes of irresistible magnetic charm. Yet Susanna grows wary and then warier as her mother seduces her boyfriend, abuses drugs and constantly lies. Susanna's own behavior, particularly with men, begins to mirror her mother's. If "as the twig is bent, so grows the tree" is a true saying, then how can Susanna ever learn to find honest love and live an honorable life?
  
  HER LAST DEATH 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.
  
  --- Reviewed by Terry Miller Shannon [...]
  
  
• The Apple Don't Fall Far From the Tree
  By AL2XIB3CGSD72 on 2008-03-05
  This is full of self-absorbed people...she wouldn't smoke pot, but it was okay to snort cocaine...the promiscuity....she knew better...the privileged don't live like us normal folks...no morals, etc...
  
  
• Her Last Death
  By A1UR1586X33JCJ on 2008-02-08
  Not the best book I've read, In fact I thought it was awful. I'm sorry I really hated it, too much of her sex life and nothing to hold my attention.
  
  
• Sexy and Harrowing
  By A2OPZLP1LKWOTP on 2008-02-16
  A brutally honest memoir from a brilliant first-time author. Sonnenberg grabs you by the throat on page one and never lets you go. She has truly plumbed the depths of her soul to bring us this astonishing book. I can only gape at the courage it must have taken to sit down in a quiet room, to travel back to all those exotic, yet painful places and drag the memories up and out. Some are delicious and naughty. Some are horrifying. Most will shock you. But the beauty and subtly of the sentences she crafts will leave you wanting more. When I came to the end, I was weeping and cheering for her at the same time. Amazed that a book could elicit such a reaction, and wondering how she not only survived her childhood, but managed to come through it with so much strength, self-assurance and wisdom. I found myself unable to put this book down. If you liked Tobias Wolff's THIS BOY'S LIFE, this girl's life will top it.
  
  
• Disappointing...
  By A3MOHAYDKS7SG2 on 2008-03-19
  * Spoilers*
  
  Like other reviewers, I was drawn to "Her Last Death" because it sounded like the kind of dysfunctional family memoir that keeps me turning pages. I appreciate anyone who can honestly look back at a horrendous childhood. It's so much healthier than glossing over appalling human behavior. Having read and loved "Running with Scissors" and "The Glass Castle" I was expecting something similar.
  
  Initially, I loved the book. The New York in the '70s setting, the outrageous Daphne (truly the mother from hell), the shocking revelations. Soon, though, this seemed like a story stretched very thin. The bulk of the book is one sexual exploit after another, each one slightly more shocking than the last. Several, such as a seduction of brothers and of an orthodox rabbi, seemed fabricated. By the time Susanna was a faux lesbian in Missoula, I'd had enough.
  
  As if sensing the reader's boredom, the author ends the tedious sexual exploits and shifts into her own struggles with motherhood. The parallels are worth plumbing... is parenting so inherantly difficult that Susanna can forgive her own mother for her mistakes? This section (making up roughly the last 70 pages) has some bite to it. However, Sonnenberg can't resist a cheap ending, which gives a false sense that she has learned from her mother's mistakes and has exchanged her mother's life of decadence for traditional domestic bliss. I'm am skeptical that she has really overcome the values she was raised with.
  
  
• A Joke
  By A71HEMSDN988 on 2008-06-26
  Pffft! How does this get to be published? Try Walls's Glass Castle or Taylor's Rules for Saying Goodbye for a MUCH better young woman's memoir.
  
  
• strange indeed
  By A3UUKH2RCDGOB3 on 2008-02-03
  I found this book to be just too much information. All I could think of the last half of the book was that this woman has sons. Not a book I'd want my sons to read about their mother. I found her to be full of self pity and she never made the characters real. Why was the mother as she was? What about her past? Was she a a compulsive liar or was some of the name dropping true? Very confusing. I love memoirs and was very disappointed in this one. Highly recommend Glass Castle.
  
  
• Interesting but questionable...
  By A1JPKAO910TCH6 on 2008-03-03
  I enjoyed the creative way the book was written but doubted some of the contents.
  
  
  
• Not your typical "poor little rich girl" memoir
  By A3LBSKBB03DFDW on 2008-04-01
  OK, Susan Sonnenberg grew up rich. No getting around it. But while a wealthy upbringing usually colors a memoir in a distinctively self-pitying shade (usually through the author trying to hide it), this memoir actually acknowledges that while the money made her life comfortable, it didn't mean her life was free of torment.
  
  What is perhaps most striking about the eloquently expressed reflections and memories here is how Sonnenberg can write about what has lacks a definable quality...it isn't quite sexual abuse, though sexually inappropriate; it isn't quite forced drug addiction, but availability of drugs makes a terrible living environment; and what do you call it when your mother teaches you that sex is the key to everything but then tries to protect you from the men that want to have sex with you?
  
  The biggest surprise as I read was how much the author seemed to have in common with the author of Sickened, whose mother suffered from Munchausen's by proxy. The two women are worlds apart, and yet suffer for their mothers' sins. They are also both exquisitely crafted memoirs, both trying to make sense of strange childhoods, and trying to find who they are as adults separate from their mothers.
  
  
• Mummy Dearest
  By A1WUPRPQBV4FB8 on 2008-07-03
  Reading this book, the story of Susanna's upbringing and early years of marriage and motherhood, was like reading someone's diary. Her Last Death is the intimate purging of an extraordinary life with Mummy--perhaps one of the most unfit and reckless characters ever to raise children. What's remarkable is that Susanna not only lived to tell the tale, but also ultimately seems to have turned out to be quite "normal." She has certainly realized her potential as an educated and talented writer.
  
  It's the good writing that got me through this quick read. It certainly wasn't the subject matter. I kept asking myself, uh--WHY am I reading this? It had a definite Mommie Dearest revenge factor thing going for it, but the author's love for her mother came through as well, as she struggled to find herself while standing in an overwhelming shadow. I think it made me appreciate my own childhood, and marvel at the power we have over our children in mapping out the world for them.
  
  The mother she names "Daphne," (the author makes it clear in the front notes that all names but her own have been changed), is in a word, outrageous. Living a sexy, single-girl life with two baby girls in tow, she consistently puts herself, along with her drug and sex addictions, ahead of the responsibilities of motherhood. From a daughter's eyes, the reader senses Susanna's conflict of love and betrayal as she bestows the horrendous details of her childhood. Namely, her mother's constant offerings of cocaine and alcohol to the adolescent Susanna, parading an endless line of lovers through their apartments and hotel rooms, her need to seduce each and every one of Susanna's friends (particularly the boyfriends), and explaining orgasm and introducing birth control when her daughter was hardly beyond puberty. It made me feel both sick and very sad.
  
  Susanna divulges several of her own poor choices on the way to her life, as well as her initial struggles with motherhood. She may not be the most likable character walking the roads of Montana; however, due to the way she was raised, she has evoked this reader's sympathy. Overall, I found this to be an interesting and unique memoir and would enjoy reading future work by Susanna Sonnenberg.
  
  Michele Cozzens is the author of It's Not Your Mother's Bridge Club
  
  
• Eh . . . .
  By A1K5H33ABTXW5F on 2008-07-09
  I love memoirs and I found Her last Death to be hard to leave when I had to go to work, but I have a few quibbles.
  
  The book started off wrongly in the preface where the author, Susannah Sonnenberg, warns us that the only "real" character in the book is her; everyone else has a pseudonym and people and events may be composites of characters and situations. That is not the definition of a memoir, in my opinion. Rather, I felt I was reading fiction into which the author had inserted herself. Therefore, I have no idea if what she wrote actually happened as described or if the people she wrote about, including most of all, her mother and sister and her wealthy grandparents, really existed. A memoir, at least since James Frey got reamed out by Oprah, is about real people and real occurrences.
  
  I also must admit I didn't like almost all of the people described in the book, including the author most of the time. Her husband remains a complete enigma (leading me to believe he's boringly normal) but that he doesn't seem to buy into her dramas says a lot about him. Her father has some interesting qualities and more so as his neurological disease has progressed. The mother, of course, is singularly distasteful in almost every aspect and it seems she has similarly doomed the younger sister. Her story is one of rampant, unrepentant child sexual abuse, passive aggressiveness, and deceit intended for no other purpose than to hurt her children in ways I haven't seen anywhere before. Everything she did was so inappropriately perfused with sexuality in dangerous and unspeakable ways. Should the author rear her two sons to be honest, decent, responsible, and loving adults, that will be a monumental credit to her ability to overcome her dreadful family.
  
  If readers discount the story and the people populating it as mostly fictionalized, then they will experience a well-written, fast-moving "novel" about a quite unsettling family they should never hope to meet.
  
  
• A most incredible book
  By A2ECK9JYNZ7T5E on 2008-01-23
  Her Last Death, Susanna Sonnenberg, is not grammatically correct and is not a classic. BUT, it is a most revealing story of both a mother and a daughter, their personalities, their actions. I was raised in the culture of the 1950's and 1960's. Is Sonnenbereg's book a true picture of life now? I could hardly believe a lot of what I read, and I read a lot. Yes, the book is rather sensational, and yes, I did ask myself if Sonnenberg could have made better choices in her life. And, certainly, the reader asks: Would I want my sons to read this information about me--NO, NO, NO. I can't wait until my book group reads this so that I can gain more insight into the author's culture, personality and motivations for writing such a book. I think that students of psychiatry will find this book on their READ list. DO READ IT, DO!!!!! nancy Salen
  
  
• hum......."
  By A27EQL7R5L3OYR on 2008-01-29
  I'll admit that I blew through this book, and found many passages very well written, but it hardly merited a glowing NYT review and subsequent high praise. That, I'm certain, had more to do with the author's lineage than the strength of her writing. Furthermore, the emphasis on sex was often disturbing. What was the point of including such salacious details? My guess: the author thought it was literature, art....not sure I agree. Overall, it was at times both a good read and a taxing one. .
  
  
• Complete Self Absorption
  By A1OB9H6VUB9F47 on 2008-02-15
  I was pretty disappointed by this book. It's not that the writing is bad, actually it's technically quite good, it is the story that I had no interest in whatsoever. It's interesting to me that the author is so completely opposed to her mother, but gives her father a free pass for almost the same type of behavior. In addition, I got very tired of reading about this spoiled, narcistic, self-absorbed, morally bereft, snob. How she found a nice husband to marry her is beyond me.
  
  
• not what i expected
  By A3JAS1634N4J3R on 2008-02-16
  Wish I had read some reader reviews prior to my purchase. The subject interested me, the beginning chapters drew me in. However, the emphasis on descriptive sex was repetetive as well as disturbing. The repetition of these scenarios with unending details didn't have a purpose. Mid-way through the book, I considered throwing it out. I was content with the beginning and the ending.
  Unsatisfying overall. There are some good things here, but it got drowned out by alot of sex. Maybe that was the point.
  
  
• Not Very Exciting
  By A2RUMYENCNNDRV on 2008-02-28
  This book is actually quite boring, I thought it would pick up but it never really did.
  
  

• Her Last Death: A Memoir

• The Senator's Wife
• Manic: A Memoir
• Hope's Boy: A Memoir
• A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
• The Middle Place (Voice)