Sontag: Her Life and Work

Benjamin Moser follows Susan Sontag from a childhood scattered across the American West after her father's early death, through a University of Chicago education finished at eighteen, into the public intellectual career built on essays like Notes on Camp and books including Against Interpretation, On Photography and Illness as Metaphor that made her one of the most widely read cultural critics of her era. Named Sontag's authorized biographer in 2013, Moser drew on her personal papers and journals to follow her past the public persona into a private life she had spent decades managing.

The book follows Sontag's relationships with women, including the playwright Maria Irene Fornes and photographer Annie Leibovitz, a decades long relationship many earlier obituaries had simply left out, and makes the striking argument, drawn from Sontag's own papers, that she was the primary author of Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, a 1959 study published under her former husband Philip Rieff's name alone, an arrangement Moser ties to a settlement that gave Sontag custody of their son David. Moser follows Sontag through her public activism, directing Waiting for Godot in besieged Sarajevo in the 1990s, and into her illness and death in December 2004 from a blood cancer, myelodysplastic syndrome that had progressed into acute leukemia.

Moser writes with full access to the archive and reads Sontag's contradictions, her self invention, her ambition, her private vulnerability, as of a piece rather than as competing versions of the same person, and reading the book means following a subject who spent her whole life curating her own image finally examined from the inside. It suits a reader who already knows Sontag's essays and wants the woman who wrote them, private correspondence and all, filled in behind them.