Novelist Sigrid Nunez was an aspiring writer when she first met Susan Sontag, already a legendary figure known for her polemical essays, her blindingly bright intelligence, and her edgy personal style, Sontag introduced Nunez to her son, the writer David Rieff, and the two began dating.
Sigrid Nunez has published six critically acclaimed novels, including The Friend,The Last of Her Kind and Salvation City. She has contributed to The New York Times, Harper's, and McSweeney's, among many others. She lives in New York City.
"A fresh and touching book…[Nunez’s] genuine curiosity about her
own experience—her memories of love lost, youth and youth lost—is
the quality that gives this book an elegant, almost compulsive
readability." –The New York Review of Books
"A loving memoir, full of arresting details and an occasionally
spirited defense of her mentor…Sontag [once] remarked that all her
work says ‘be serious, be passionate, wake up.’ Clearly someone was
listening." –The Los Angeles Times
"Susan Sontag roars to life…As magnetic and complicated as Sontag
herself, Nunez’s homage is both critical and compassionate…[an]
elegantly crafted chronicle of a young writer’s artistic
education." –Vanity Fair
"Nunez, an uncompromising talent in her own right, offers the most
vibrant and multifaceted portrait of Sontag to date."—Vogue
"Nunez has constructed a eulogy that mythologizes and humanizes one
of the most intimidating figures of contemporary culture."—The
Boston Globe
"Sempre Susan doesn’t just evoke Susan Sontag, the person, with
hard-won sympathy, insight, and cool; it contains (in a very tiny
space) material for an entire novel of idealism and
disillusionment….this memoir captures the spirit of her times."—The
Paris Review, Staff Picks
"Sontag once wrote about feeling estranged from the ‘Susan Sontag’
who stood on the spine of the books she had written. In Nunez’s
Sempre Susan, the gap between the writer and the person who wrote
the books is made all the more vividly real—a reminder of the
extraordinary transformative work that goes into writing in the
first place."—Slate
"Nunez, now a fine novelist, has written a clear-eyed tribute…With
an eye for the telling detail, this intimate and occasionally raw
portrait makes it plain that despite all Sontag’s public renown,
much of her was entirely mysterious." –The Economist
"A wonderful novelist remembers Susan Sontag as a writer, mentor,
woman, friend and enthusiastic lover of a vanished New York."
–Katha Pollitt, The Nation’s Summer Reading List
"Nunez’s book is an elegy for a great woman and the company she
kept, the vanished salon where she was the center."—The New York
Observer
"A boldly intimate, stingingly frank, and genuinely fascinating
memoir."—Booklist
"Graceful, respectful and achingly honest."—Kirkus
"Sigrid Nunez’s intimate portrayal of Susan Sontag will fascinate
both ardent Sontag fans and those who have never read her work.
This memoir is at once a window into the writing life in general,
an examination of the complexities of one artist in particular, and
a tribute to the lost intellectual New York City of the 1970s.
Remarkably, it’s as honest as it is affectionate and as sad as it
is charming."—Curtis Sittenfeld
"Sempre Susan is written with quiet authority, flashes of poetry,
and a steady accumulation of startling, precise details, some
apocryphal (Sontag didn’t know what a dragonfly was? drank blood as
a child?), until by the end Sontag the Myth comes to life. What is
amazing about this wonderful book is that by the end we know as
much about Nunez as we do about Sontag, by the very focus of her
attention, by her perception of the myth, by her compassionate
interpretation."—Nick Flynn
"This detailed, nuanced account of the more private side of a
complex, contradictory public figure is told with even-handed good
humor and more than a little compassion. Utterly absorbing."—Lydia
Davis
"The best thing written about Sontag."—Edmund White
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