Her Last Death: A Memoir by Susanna Sonnenberg, Susanna Sonnenberg (Read by)

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Extreme situations often result in extreme decisions. When she received the call about her mother's grave condition, Susanna Sonnenberg was leading a quiet, relatively normal life in Montana. Her first impulse was to make arrangements to fly to her mother's bedside, but then, she reconsidered. Sonnenberg's difficult relationship and long estrangement from her mother led her finally to reject any deathbed reunion. In Her Last Death, she examines the past incidents and tugs of emotion that caused such a drastic gesture of finality. Sometimes jarring, this memoir focuses on wounds and animosity that usually remain unspoken.

From the Publisher

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.

The New York Times - Michiko Kakutani

"Her Last Death recounts "the true calamity of being daughter to this mother," and the wonder of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and found a way of turning her memories into a fiercely observed, fluently written book that captures the chaos and confusions of her youth, the daughter of an unpredictable pill-and-coke addicted mother and a brilliant, self-absorbed father, neither of whom had the faintest idea of how to be a parent."

The New York Times

"Her Last Death recounts 'the true calamity of being daughter to this mother,' and the wonder of this memoir is that the author survived her traumatic childhood and found a way of turning her memories into a fiercely observed, fluently written book...Writing in sharp, crystalline prose, Ms. Sonnenberg... plung(es) readers into a sort of perpetual present tense in which we are made to experience, almost firsthand, the inexplicable and perverse behavior of an impossible woman from the point of view of her aghast, bedazzled -- and immensely gifted -- daughter."

Elizabeth Brinkley - Library Journal

This is one of the best memoirs to come on the scene since Jeanette Walls's The Glass Castle, though the world of Sonnenberg's childhood is as privileged as Walls's was marked by scarcity and want. With her two daughters, Sonnenberg's single mother, Daphne, managed to remain a part of this rarefied environment by the skin of her teeth, thanks to benevolent grandparents and the occasional contributions of a distant father. But while Daphne appeared electrifying and glamorous to the young Susanna, no amount of good fortune could keep her from descending, lie by lie, addiction by addiction, into as disappointing a figure as the father in The Glass Castle. Susanna's progressive disenchantment with her often abusive mother-Daphne introduced her daughter to cocaine and punched her in the stomach repeatedly for seemingly expressing interest in a new boyfriend-is charted with precise, unsparing, and luminous prose. A heartbreaking yet wickedly entertaining portrait of a magically seductive, immensely flawed mother who fails dramatically as a parent and of a daughter who learns to trust and love others despite an orphanlike upbringing marked by disillusion. Highly recommended for all public libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ9/1/07.]

Kirkus Reviews

A deeply personal account of the author's thorny relationship with her mother. One morning, while "leading an unremarkable life" with her husband and young sons in Montana, Sonnenberg received a phone call with the news that her mother had been severely, probably fatally injured in a car accident. She set about making arrangements to fly to Barbados, where her mother lived, then changed her mind. They were already estranged, but this decision put a definitive end to the single most important and dependent relationship of the author's life. It also led to a breach with her sister, who was outraged that she wouldn't come to an apparently dying woman's bedside, then was stuck with the caretaking responsibilities when their mother recovered. The author's remembrances are designed to justify her decision not to go. She depicts her mother as a stunning and seductive pathological liar with a long history of cocaine and painkiller abuse, as well as unscrupulous sexual behavior. The author spent many years entangled in her mother's capricious demands, often unable to discern truth from lies. The shocking details Sonnenberg provides about her upbringing certainly show her mother behaving recklessly. The lack of maternal nurturing prompted a hunger in her for fulfillment elsewhere, first in romantic relationships and then as a mother herself. Yet they were close for decades, albeit often in an unhealthy way. Readers may not entirely understand the author's extreme choice to end contact altogether, or entirely credit her assertion that the distance between them now serves as a comfort. The permanent rift with her sister serves as a reminder of the cost of Sonnenberg's choice, with which she grapplesto live. Tragic but arresting-a worthy companion to Simone de Beauvoir's and Vivian Gornick's explorations of the complicated mother-daughter dynamic.

Product Details

• Reading Group Guide
• Forewords & Introductions
• Read an Excerpt

Reading Group Guide

Questions for Discussion

1. Her Last Death opens with the report of Daphne's car accident in Barbados and the author's decision not to go to her. Readers have the rest of the book to contemplate Susanna's choice while learning about the family history behind it. Near the book's end Sonnenberg writes, "What kind of person doesn't go to her mother's deathbed?....I didn't go because I couldn't. That's what had become of us" (p. 268). Did you agree with Sonnenberg's decision? Did your feeling about her choice change after she unfolded the story of her childhood and adolescence with her mother?

2. When Susanna meets her English teacher Wyatt for the first time Daphne tells her, "He adores you....Trust me...[t]he world is about sex" (p. 112). Susanna loses her virginity to Wyatt when she is sixteen and engages in a lengthy affair with him. She subsequently spends many years having sex "with everybody." "I used to court oblivion, cancel everything, forget trouble. That was sex's delicious point, the glittering instruction of lust and its momentum" (p. 189). How do Daphne's promiscuity and lack of boundaries influence Susanna's attitude toward sex and her choice of sexual partners? Discuss the theme of sex in the book and the various ways it is used.

3. Sonnenberg can be self critical. She writes openly about what she sees as her own flaws. When she learns her boyfriend Gordon has left her for a friend of theirs she writes, "She'd been to our parties. She'd asked how Gordon was in bed....I was supposed to be in that role, the late-arriving seductress, the snake of a friend" (p. 185). Why does Susanna describe herself this way? What other elements make up heridentity and how do they evolve from her adolescence into her thirties? Did you find yourself feeling judgmental and if so, why? How does her mother evolve?

4. Daphne abuses illegal and prescription drugs, is hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, physically assaults Susanna and lies compulsively. Sonnenberg never diagnoses Daphne's behavior; instead she describes the outcomes that arise from "the tangle of being with her" (p.6). How is her omission unusual?

5. Aside from leading to an estrangement with her mother, in what other ways did Sonnenberg's decision to stay in Montana after Daphne's accident change her life? Consider her various family relationships, her sense of self, her history with her mother, and her aspirations for her own children.

6. How might you say that Sonnenberg's relationship with her mother is in some ways a heightened version of any typical mother-daughter relationship? What qualities of their relationship are most distorted?

7. Writing is important to Susanna's life. What role do writing and reading play in Sonnenberg's telling of this story? What is the effect of the diary entries in the book?

8. Although Sonnenberg's father could be critical and distant, and did nothing to protect his daughters from Daphne's harm, Sonnenberg has a good relationship with him as an adult. "He could hurt my feelings, still exasperate me with his self-absorption, but we enjoyed each other" (p. 272). Why is Susanna able to forgive her father and get along with him?

9. Discuss the complicated relationship between Daphne's expectations for Susanna's life and Susanna's own expectations and perception of herself. How is this a common and difficult issue for all parents and children?

10. Sonnenberg provides a note at the beginning of the book: "This is a work of memoir and subject to the imperfections of memory. I have been faithful to what I remember, and people in my family may remember shared experiences differently...I have changed all names but my own to emphasize that this story could only be mine." What does Her Last Death show about the nature of memory, especially in families? How else is the story only Susanna's, and not her mother's or her family's?

11. Susanna arrives in Montana ready to start fresh and live a simpler life, emulating the behavior of her future husband Christopher. "With Christopher everything was the machine of the oiled world, just going along" (p. 202). Yet by the time she checks into her first motel she'd "already lied, couldn't go more than a day. Tomorrow I'd start again" (p. 202). How does lying help or hinder Susanna as she tries to cope with the world? How does she begin to understand her habits and to break them?

12. How does the presence of wealth in Susanna's family shape her mother's behavior and the family dynamic? How do the issues of wealth and class shape the book as a whole? How do Daphne's wealth and beauty influence people's perception of her and of her parenting skills?

13. Susanna is strongly drawn to Christopher's honesty. In what other ways is Christopher different from anyone Susanna has ever met? What makes him the driving force behind Susanna's transformation? Is he also flawed?

14. It has been only five months since Susanna's abortion when Christopher decides he is ready for children. "I took it on glumly. The thought kept coming back: I would still be pregnant if he'd realized a little faster. My March 30th baby was due in two months" (p. 226). How did you feel about Christopher's change of heart? Why do you think Sonnenberg includes the abortion in the book?

15. Going through letters from her mother, Sonnenberg is struck by the way Daphne "wanted to prove so much, conquer my resistance. Again and again, her longing for me overtakes the letter...This is the hardest thing for me to read, how much she wanted me, how distant I stayed" (p. 259). Did you sympathize with Daphne? Do you think there was any way for Susanna and Daphne to continue a relationship?

16. How do the few flashbacks at the end of the book emphasize the difficulty of the choice Sonnenberg has made? Why do you think she chose to showcase these particular incidents at the end? How are they related?

17. How does Her Last Death compare to other memoirs you've read, particularly those focusing on parent-child relationships or difficult childhoods?

Enhance Your Book Club:

1. Visit the author's website at www.susannasonnenberg.com for reviews, upcoming appearances, and other news. Many of Sonnenberg's personal essays from such publications such as O, the Oprah Magazine and Parenting can also be found online. (Elle articles can't be found online)

2. Choose a memory or detail about yourself that you haven't admitted or revealed and share it. What does it feel like to say it aloud, to have others hear it, to invite other people's responses?

3. If you liked Her Last Death, try some other memoirs about unusual childhoods, such as The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, The Liars' Club and Cherry by Mary Karr, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, Stop-Time by Frank Conroy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy, The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison, and Them by Francine du Plessix Gray.

Forewords & Introductions

Questions for Discussion

1. Her Last Death opens with the report of Daphne's car accident in Barbados and the author's decision not to go to her. Readers have the rest of the book to contemplate Susanna's choice while learning about the family history behind it. Near the book's end Sonnenberg writes, "What kind of person doesn't go to her mother's deathbed?....I didn't go because I couldn't. That's what had become of us" (p. 268). Did you agree with Sonnenberg's decision? Did your feeling about her choice change after she unfolded the story of her childhood and adolescence with her mother?

2. When Susanna meets her English teacher Wyatt for the first time Daphne tells her, "He adores you....Trust me...[t]he world is about sex" (p. 112). Susanna loses her virginity to Wyatt when she is sixteen and engages in a lengthy affair with him. She subsequently spends many years having sex "with everybody." "I used to court oblivion, cancel everything, forget trouble. That was sex's delicious point, the glittering instruction of lust and its momentum" (p. 189). How do Daphne's promiscuity and lack of boundaries influence Susanna's attitude toward sex and her choice of sexual partners? Discuss the theme of sex in the book and the various ways it is used.

3. Sonnenberg can be self critical. She writes openly about what she sees as her own flaws. When she learns her boyfriend Gordon has left her for a friend of theirs she writes, "She'd been to our parties. She'd asked how Gordon was in bed....I was supposed to be in that role, the late-arriving seductress, the snake of a friend" (p. 185). Why does Susanna describe herself this way? What other elements make up heridentity and how do they evolve from her adolescence into her thirties? Did you find yourself feeling judgmental and if so, why? How does her mother evolve?

4. Daphne abuses illegal and prescription drugs, is hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, physically assaults Susanna and lies compulsively. Sonnenberg never diagnoses Daphne's behavior; instead she describes the outcomes that arise from "the tangle of being with her" (p.6). How is her omission unusual?

5. Aside from leading to an estrangement with her mother, in what other ways did Sonnenberg's decision to stay in Montana after Daphne's accident change her life? Consider her various family relationships, her sense of self, her history with her mother, and her aspirations for her own children.

6. How might you say that Sonnenberg's relationship with her mother is in some ways a heightened version of any typical mother-daughter relationship? What qualities of their relationship are most distorted?

7. Writing is important to Susanna's life. What role do writing and reading play in Sonnenberg's telling of this story? What is the effect of the diary entries in the book?

8. Although Sonnenberg's father could be critical and distant, and did nothing to protect his daughters from Daphne's harm, Sonnenberg has a good relationship with him as an adult. "He could hurt my feelings, still exasperate me with his self-absorption, but we enjoyed each other" (p. 272). Why is Susanna able to forgive her father and get along with him?

9. Discuss the complicated relationship between Daphne's expectations for Susanna's life and Susanna's own expectations and perception of herself. How is this a common and difficult issue for all parents and children?

10. Sonnenberg provides a note at the beginning of the book: "This is a work of memoir and subject to the imperfections of memory. I have been faithful to what I remember, and people in my family may remember shared experiences differently...I have changed all names but my own to emphasize that this story could only be mine." What does Her Last Death show about the nature of memory, especially in families? How else is the story only Susanna's, and not her mother's or her family's?

11. Susanna arrives in Montana ready to start fresh and live a simpler life, emulating the behavior of her future husband Christopher. "With Christopher everything was the machine of the oiled world, just going along" (p. 202). Yet by the time she checks into her first motel she'd "already lied, couldn't go more than a day. Tomorrow I'd start again" (p. 202). How does lying help or hinder Susanna as she tries to cope with the world? How does she begin to understand her habits and to break them?

12. How does the presence of wealth in Susanna's family shape her mother's behavior and the family dynamic? How do the issues of wealth and class shape the book as a whole? How do Daphne's wealth and beauty influence people's perception of her and of her parenting skills?

13. Susanna is strongly drawn to Christopher's honesty. In what other ways is Christopher different from anyone Susanna has ever met? What makes him the driving force behind Susanna's transformation? Is he also flawed?

14. It has been only five months since Susanna's abortion when Christopher decides he is ready for children. "I took it on glumly. The thought kept coming back: I would still be pregnant if he'd realized a little faster. My March 30th baby was due in two months" (p. 226). How did you feel about Christopher's change of heart? Why do you think Sonnenberg includes the abortion in the book?

15. Going through letters from her mother, Sonnenberg is struck by the way Daphne "wanted to prove so much, conquer my resistance. Again and again, her longing for me overtakes the letter...This is the hardest thing for me to read, how much she wanted me, how distant I stayed" (p. 259). Did you sympathize with Daphne? Do you think there was any way for Susanna and Daphne to continue a relationship?

16. How do the few flashbacks at the end of the book emphasize the difficulty of the choice Sonnenberg has made? Why do you think she chose to showcase these particular incidents at the end? How are they related?

17. How does Her Last Death compare to other memoirs you've read, particularly those focusing on parent-child relationships or difficult childhoods?

Enhance Your Book Club:

1. Visit the author's website at www.susannasonnenberg.com for reviews, upcoming appearances, and other news. Many of Sonnenberg's personal essays from such publications such as O, the Oprah Magazine and Parenting can also be found online. (Elle articles can't be found online)

2. Choose a memory or detail about yourself that you haven't admitted or revealed and share it. What does it feel like to say it aloud, to have others hear it, to invite other people's responses?

3. If you liked Her Last Death, try some other memoirs about unusual childhoods, such as The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, The Liars' Club and Cherry by Mary Karr, This Boy's Life by Tobias Wolff, Stop-Time by Frank Conroy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy, The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison, and Them by Francine du Plessix Gray.

Susanna Sonnenberg was born in London in 1965 and grew up in New York. Her essays have appeared in Elle, O, the Oprah Magazine and Parenting, among other magazines. She lives in Montana with her husband and two sons.

Read an Excerpt

In a house in Montana thousands of miles from my mother, I am thirty-seven, leading an unremarkable life. My mother lives in Barbados, where she stayed after her third husband died. I've never seen her house. She plays tennis and has houseguests, I hear, but we don't speak. Instead, I concentrate on the organic granola my two boys like, the seascape mural I'm about to paint on their bedroom wall. I preside over their school board and review movies for the paper. I send the photos of Halloween costumes and birthday parties to my father and stepmother. Last night, like most nights, my husband and I read books to each of the boys, crossing back and forth between their beds with kisses for them and patient hugs for their stuffed animals. This morning my husband will pack the lunch for our six-year-old, and I'll play with the two-year-old until his nap. We've just purchased this hundred-year-old house. On moving day I realized we would never invite my mother to see it. We live in sunny rooms messy with socks and books, a bathroom scattered with tub toys that are always drying, never dry. Christopher and I wonder before sleep at our boys' happiness and their invisible trust. Sometimes I'm jealous of them.

I've lived apart from my mother since I left for boarding school at fourteen. I called home often then, pressing her voice to my ear, our mutual interest insatiable. She called me from restaurant cloakrooms and lovers' beds, ready to start new rumors. She called from hospitals after back surgery. She phoned from airports, dinner parties and the lobbies of movie theaters in which she stood weeping over a love story. She needed me, she said, to calm her down.

She was suddenly better. She was cured. She didn't want to talk about any of it. She felt good now, she said. Could she visit, see the baby? My sister and I matched up our pieces of her recovery. We were used to checking with each other (" -- and please don't tell your sister"), fitting together a complete story from the fragments she discarded. But we couldn't get these details to align. The discrepancies were too great, and we didn't want to notice this together. Then a family friend told me Daphne hadn't been "incommunicado" for six weeks of radiation. She'd been at a spa in France or at a diet clinic. There was no doctor. It was an invented doctor.

I'm alone at the kitchen table, and I call my sister in Barbados, embarrassed I'm still at home. Right away she starts reporting. After three surgeries in thirty-six hours, the doctors are coping with our mother's shattered shins and pelvis. Her front teeth are gone; her organs won't reveal their damage for a few days. The details stagger me. Penelope knows too much and too little. Where's the relief of the con unveiled, the act resolved? But there's only my sister in dry tears and our mother, who won't wake up.