* 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. |
Her Last Death: A Memoir Books In Print, Audio Books.