Sontag

Her Life and Work

By: Benjamin Moser

Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert

The definitive portrait of one of the American Century’s most towering intellectuals: her writing and her radical thought, her public activism and her hidden private face.

No writer is as emblematic of the American twentieth century as Susan Sontag. Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money—and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated—and undermined—her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own.

Utilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo—Sontag is the first book based on the writer’s restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. It is a definitive portrait—a great American novel in the form of a biography.

Revealing Bio on a Superlative Life

Sunsan Sontag’s essays have been a strong influence on the way I view our culture and my medium, photography. It was enriching, though brutal, to learn more about her life. Author Benjamin Moser speaks candidly and with great insight about the life of a remarkable intellectual of our generation, a unique voice. A great listen to anyone interested in contemporary culture.

I love Susan Sontag’s writing!

Susan Sontag’s life was as she said - passionate unto the end. To write as a bullfighter can risk his life standing before the bull. It is a ritual, sacrifice and the torero placed the sword accurately the bull never move and simply drop were he stands. It’s courage, it’s precision, a perfect skill with no suffering. Sontag wrote with this kind of passion.

Narrator

Couldn’t get through the book as I couldn’t listen to the narrator for another second.
Really disappointed. I think the book is probably very good!

Remarkable undertaking

Fabulous following of Sontag’s life and culture. Informative in a broad spectrum of insights. Introduction and afterwords are masterful. Darla Comeaux 9/9/22

I wanted another 22 hours

I adored this book. Philosophy! Queerness! Gossip! Art! Love! Loss! Sickness! Death! War! I sobbed when it was over. I wanted more. Benjamin Moser has summoned controversy over the way he took liberties crafting Sontag's inner world, but the reader can sort through what is slippery and what is solid easily enough. I deeply appreciate his portrait of how this writer came to be a flawed but brilliant human AND a flawed but brilliant artist.