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Gag Gifts, Occasion Gifts - Her Last Death: A Memoir
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List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $10.20
Your Save: $ 4.80 ( 32% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Scribner
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 362.29092
EAN: 9780743291095
ISBN: 0743291093
Label: Scribner
Manufacturer: Scribner
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 288
Publication Date: 2008-10-07
Publisher: Scribner
Studio: Scribner
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Editorial Reviews:
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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.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Something lacking
Comment: Having had a wife who suffered sexual abuse from a stepfather as child, I could not stop reading this book from the first chapter. It hit too close to home. The author's prose is crisp, sharp, and vivid, but therein may lie the rub. I could never quite get a feel for how this insane mother truly affected her emotions and world view. She writes almost in a distant and third person non-emotional state, as if recording this had happened to another person. Sure, she describes how her mother's pathological behavior affected her relationships with lovers and children, but for me it rang hollow. I still could not quite feel or figure how, or who, Susie is, or was. I kept reading, fully engrossed, unable to stop, like watching a car or train wreck.
Finally, we are still left to wonder where or when her mother really does die, so the title is a bit misleading, but does work to draw one into the web of dysfunctional childhoods. For me, I would have liked a little more meat and substance.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hard to put down
Comment: I read and read and when I wasn't reading I was thinking about when I could continue reading. I really admire Susanna for stating her true feelings. She doesn't come across as being a victim; her writing style comes across as a matter of fact.
She tells about her dysfunctional relationship with her mother and father and their many relationships after the divorce. She also tells about her much needed sexual attention from men. Over all I think it's one of the better memoirs that I've read.
Customer Rating:
Summary: pretentious, voyeuristic and self-serving description of the consequences of parental abuse
Comment: I cannot join the rhapsody of praise critics have lavished on Susanna Sonnenberg's memoir, "Her Last Death." Initially I felt pity for the author, but soon enough, compassion changed to contempt, engagement became indifference. Sonnenberg is the daughter of enormously wealthy and spiritually bankrupt parents, and her youth was spent in astonishing material affluence. As if to compensate for the surfeit of money surrounding Susanna, her parents proved to be incompetent, emotionally distant and cruel, especially her mother, who may well lay claim to have her own room in the Hall of Fame for liars. "Her Last Death" is a voyeuristic, embarrassing description of abuse; lacking universal lessons, the memoir abounds with grimy, disheartening revelations
The premise of the memoir is an answer to a question: Why does a daughter refuse to fly from her Montana home to be at the bedside of her comatose mother? For the next 250 pages, Ms. Sonnenberg gives us, in excruciating detail, the reason for her decision. We learn that her mother, Daphne, is a pathological liar and a sex maniac. Disdainful of any personal boundaries that may separate her from her daughter, Daphne attempts to indoctrinate her young daughter into a world of hedonism where indiscriminate sexual encounters and casual use of addictive drugs abound..
Given this endless catalogue of abuse, it is paradoxical that Sonnenberg never figures out how to stop her own self-absorption. Both mother and daughter are self-absorbed and limited people; their addiction to conspicuous consumption distances themselves not only from each other, but from the real world. Since the Sonnenberg family possesses extraordinary wealth, it is often difficult for readers to respond sympathetically to Susanna's admission admission that she has never had to wait in a line in her life until she has reached adulthood?
The only value this overwrought memoir has is its painful realizations that abusive parents cripple their children's ability to become parents in their own right. Children with parents who have no boundaries become adults who doubt their own abilities to function as mothers or fathers. Susanna is panic stricken after giving birth to her first son, and her self-doubt rings true. Of all the pernicious influences Daphne had on Susanna, it is her residual mistrust of self that is most horrifying.
An adult so dwarfed by wealth that she doesn't understand the mechanics of making a grilled cheese sandwich is a severely limited human being, a person with whom most readers cannot identify. Human anguish abounds in this tell-all memoir, but it is tinctured by an environment in which only the super-rich live. When the mother gloats over successfully shoplifting toiletries, I hoped that she would have been arrested, tried and convicted. Instead, the punishment the mother deserves has been reserved for Sonnenberg's readers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hard to finish...
Comment: This was an awful book. The author is a narcissist who never manages to fully develop any thought. I actually felt sorry for the author's mother at the end because I disliked her so much. I was relieved when I finally finished the book...
Customer Rating:
Summary: The spirit of truth
Comment: Even though Sonnenberg has obscured so many facts and is so careful to protect identities that I think it has really inhibited some essential elements, the spirit of truth is there. I say this as someone who has a lived a version of her life, child of a brilliant but disturbed bipolar parent. In early life the lay of the land and the nature of reality is heavily influenced by your caretakers. If they are insane or addicted, the experience of feeling one's way around the 'normal' world can be unsettling to say the least. The author really nails those sensations when she is in more healthy 'normal' settings of friends and school. The ambivalence of deeply loving someone who harms you is also conveyed beautifully, in my opinion. Emotions aren't black and white, but the damage these disturbed parents wreak on their offspring is very real and lasting. I found the book spellbinding, could ruefully relate to much of it, and am dying to see pictures of the mother depicted here. I have found out she is still living, along with some of the other family members. If you too had a less than Leave it to Beaver upbringing, particularly if you are a child of parents in perpetual adolescence, you will appreciate the book.
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