{"id":13776,"date":"2011-04-04T12:21:00","date_gmt":"2011-04-04T16:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=13776"},"modified":"2011-04-04T14:18:32","modified_gmt":"2011-04-04T18:18:32","slug":"sigrid-nunez-on-susan-sontag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2011\/04\/04\/sigrid-nunez-on-susan-sontag\/","title":{"rendered":"Sigrid Nunez on Susan Sontag"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Susan Sontag in 1975, a year before she met Sigrid Nunez. \u00a9 Estate of Peter Hujar.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the spring of 1976, Sigrid Nunez went to the apartment of Susan Sontag, who was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help answer her mail. Nunez had just gotten her M.F.A. from Columbia and lived nearby to Sontag\u2019s apartment at 340 Riverside Drive. On her third visit, Nunez met Sontag\u2019s son, David Rieff, and shortly thereafter the two began dating. It wasn\u2019t long before Nunez moved in, beginning what would be a complicated relationship with both Sontag and her son. Her memoir, <\/em>Sempre Susan<\/a>, chronicles those few years she spent with Sontag and Rieff. We sat down for coffee not too long ago at the City Bakery on 18th Street to talk about the book.<\/em><\/p>\n

I was really struck by the line in the book where you say, \u201cExceptionalism: Was it really a good idea for the three of us, Susan, her son, myself to share the same household?\u201d Was it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, as it turned out, it was a very bad idea. But at the time there were various reasons that made it less crazy than it might have seemed. First of all, Susan had just recently been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. She was also in the middle of breaking up with the woman who\u2019d been her partner for several years. She\u2019d always hated living alone, but now she was frankly terrified, and she made it clear that she\u2019d be devastated if David were to move out. Also, David was still in school at the time, and he was financially dependent on Susan.<\/p>\n

I could see myself being excited about the idea of living with Susan Sontag, and being eager to experience the intimacy of a peculiar situation. Was part of you unconcerned about whether this was a good idea?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was never not<\/em> concerned about it, but the truth is I thought it was going to be temporary. In fact, in the book, I originally said this in so many words, but I ended up cutting that part because it sounded silly, like I was trying to make excuses. But the truth is, I figured once David finished school we\u2019d move into a place of our own. As time passed, though, it became increasingly clear that Susan would do anything to keep David from moving out. And it wasn\u2019t just a question of the three of us living under the same roof. Susan wanted the three of us to do everything together. As I say in the book, I can hardly remember times when David and I went out alone.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Left: Nunez and Sontag in 1977. Right: Rieff. <\/p><\/div>\n

Was she forthcoming about the fact that she really just wanted to be with her son? <\/strong><\/p>\n

As she said often, defensively, \u201cWhy do we have to live like everyone else?\u201d As far as she was concerned, there was nothing so damn great about the traditional nuclear family. In fact, she loathed the very idea of the nuclear family. And she pointed out that, in other cultures, an arrangement like ours would\u2019ve been perfectly normal. Also, she always insisted that she and David were different from ordinary mothers and sons. She liked to think of herself as David\u2019s \u201cgoofy older sister.\u201d It wasn\u2019t neediness that made her want to keep David with her, she\u2019d tell people, but her enormous love for him.<\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/p>\n

You talk about how your writing changed after you had this experience with Susan. I was really taken by those passages where you describe her giving you changes and advice on your fiction and you don\u2019t accept it.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I hadn\u2019t published anything yet. I was trying to write, but nothing was really working out. And the whole time I was living with Susan and David, I wasn\u2019t able to write. But because she kept pushing me, I did finally show her a story I\u2019d written. She was generous in her comments and she encouraged me to think I was someone who could become a writer. But for the most part, whenever she tried to criticize my work, I didn\u2019t take it well.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I was like a lot of my own students, who don\u2019t really want criticism, just encouragement. It\u2019s both embarrassing and hilarious to remember it now. You don\u2019t sit there at twenty-five, unpublished, inexperienced, and respond to Susan Sontag\u2019s editorial suggestions like a little snot, rejecting every one of them. But it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn\u2019t admire Susan\u2019s own fiction. I\u2019d read her first two novels and some of her stories, and I didn\u2019t admire them the way I admired the essays. So when she tried to talk to me about language and style, I didn\u2019t really trust what she said. Anyway, she was offended, of course, and she didn\u2019t forget either. Years later, she\u2019d ask me to send her my work and when I did she refused to say anything about it.<\/p>\n

Can you explain the cult of Susan Sontag?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it had everything to do with the way she first appeared on the scene, this brilliant, beautiful, intellectually passionate young woman writing these sharp, confident pieces about art and culture, in a style all her own. She was brainy but also sexy, totally bookish but also a party girl\u2014a rare and pretty irresistible combination. She captured the media\u2019s attention right away, and then, because she was so active and productive and had such a broad range of interests, and also because she was always so vocal and fearless about her opinions\u2014no few of which were controversial\u2014attention kept getting paid. It would have been hard for Susan Sontag not<\/em> to have a high profile. Whatever she said, people quoted her. And people always wanted to interview her and photograph her. Being a lifelong world traveller was part of it, too. And of course it had everything to do with gender. It was such an unusual life for a woman. I mean, if you think about it, she was pretty much the only woman of her kind.<\/p>\n

Why did you decide to write this memoir now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019d never thought about writing about Susan, ever. But about three years ago, the writer Elizabeth Benedict asked me if I\u2019d write something for an anthology called Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Influenced Them.<\/em> I wanted to write about Elizabeth Hardwick, who\u2019d been my teacher at Barnard. But it turned out both Elizabeth Benedict and Mary Gordon were already writing about her. Then it occurred to me I could write about Susan, because even though she wasn\u2019t a professor of mine, she was certainly a major influence.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d already published a short memorial piece a year after her death, and then for the anthology I wrote this twenty-page essay, which was also published in Tin House<\/em>. James Atlas read it and asked me if I\u2019d be willing to write a book about Susan, and I thought I could do that so long as it was a short book. I would never have been interested in writing a biography or a critical study, but I saw the possibility of a short memoir, taking off from the two essays I\u2019d already written and limited to that particular time when I got to know her well, and what it meant to be a young writer under her influence. But otherwise I\u2019m sure I\u2019d never have written a book about her.<\/p>\n

Were you concerned about Susan\u2019s privacy?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yes, but for a number of reasons less so than I might have been about some other public figure. For one thing, though you hear it said about Susan that she was a very private person, she was in fact the least private person I\u2019ve ever known. She told everyone everything: the most intimate details about her life, all about her personal history, the people she knew, famous or unfamous, what she thought of everyone and everything\u2014she had no use for secrecy or even for discretion. And it was never as if I was her special confidante. Whatever she shared with me she shared with many others as well.<\/p>\n

Also, so much about her private life has now been published. I\u2019m thinking of David\u2019s book, Swimming in a Sea of Death<\/em>, about her last struggle with cancer, which also draws a portrait of the kind of person Susan was at home. And now the first volume of her journals is out, an extremely self-revealing book, in which you can see clearly the same person\u2014though much younger\u2014that I was writing about. Her ferocious ambition, her neediness and vulnerability, her lack of maternal feeling, her anxiety about her sexuality, and her sense of herself as a failure at love\u2014it\u2019s all there.<\/p>\n

Was this easier to write than fiction? <\/strong><\/p>\n

In many ways, yes, and not just because it\u2019s short. Unlike most of my novels, it didn\u2019t require any research. And I didn\u2019t have to invent anything. I had my heroine, and I had my story. I just had to do the work of memory and shape what I remembered into a narrative that would be engaging for the reader.<\/p>\n

Do you trust your memory?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No one\u2019s memory is infallible, of course\u2014quite the opposite. But I do have a good memory, and in this book I only put down what I remembered very well. The time I was writing about was extremely important and vivid to me; it changed my whole life. And it\u2019s not like it all happened way back when and afterwards I didn\u2019t think about it for the next thirty years. These are experiences that are part of me, that have stayed alive in me, and that have informed my work as well as my relationships with other people. And you know how it is with memory. You might not remember what you had for dinner last night, but you remember everything about one particular summer of your youth. It\u2019s like that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the spring of 1976, Sigrid Nunez went to the apartment of Susan Sontag, who was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help answer her mail. Nunez had just gotten her M.F.A. from Columbia and lived nearby to Sontag\u2019s apartment at 340 Riverside Drive. On her third visit, Nunez met Sontag\u2019s son, David […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[2073,71,635,2071,2072,501],"class_list":["post-13776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-david-rieff","tag-fiction","tag-memoir","tag-sempre-susan","tag-sigrid-nunez","tag-susan-sontag"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nSigrid Nunez on Susan Sontag by Thessaly La Force<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"April 4, 2011 \u2013 In the spring of 1976, Sigrid Nunez went to the apartment of Susan Sontag, who was recovering from cancer surgery and needed someone to help answer her\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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