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Sontag, Susan (Subject); Rieff, David (Co-Subject) & Nunez, Sigrid (Author) : Sempre Susan: A Memoir Of Susan Sontag

James Atlas Books, New York City, NY, 2011

ISBN 1935633228

First Edition / First Printing. As New in As New Dust Jacket. 140 pages. The author's debut memoir. One of the most beautifully written memoirs of our time. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. The DJ features the iconic photograph of Susan Sontag by Peter Hujar, which first appeared in his only book, "Portraits In Life And Death" (1986), and is now in the Permanent Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art New York. Presents Sigrid Nunez's "Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag". Life under the same roof as the assistant and then de facto daughter-in-law of Susan Sontag. Her son, David Rieff, and Nunez fell in love. So she moved in. This move is the single most decisive moment of the memoir. A brilliant novelist in her own right, Nunez writes beautifully about living with Susan and David: Candid without being malicious, affectionate without being fawning, often funny, and ultimately heartbreaking. Sontag gave birth to David shortly after she turned 18 years old. Her youthful marriage prematurely ended whatever adolescence she might have had. When her marriage inevitably collapsed, this lost adolescence came back in the form of abject neediness and emotional vulnerability on Sontag's part, making her adulthood a very difficult time for her and everyone close to her. This was also the time of Sontag's worldwide fame, when the precocious American woman from LA transformed herself into the greatest American intellectual of our time. Nunez re-affirms what many others have previously said: Like her or not (it will always be a hung jury), Susan Sontag was one-of-a-kind, literally the only woman of her kind in the world. In order to live through her adolescence as an adult, Sontag inadvertently turned her son into her father. "Her therapist wondered: Why did you try to make a father out of your son? At first when she heard this, Susan said, she was shocked. She didn't know where the therapist could have come up with that! But then it hit her, she said: She had tried to do that. And we both started to cry" (Sigrid Nunez). "The best thing written about Sontag" (Edmund White). An absolute "must-have" title for Susan Sontag, David Rieff, and Sigrid Nunez collectors. This copy is very prominently and beautifully signed and dated in blue ink-pen on the title page by the author: "Sigrid Nunez 27 April 2019". It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. Laid-in is a pristine copy of the 2019 Chicago Humanities Festival Souvenir Program during which event her signature was obtained. This title is a contemporary classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed and dated copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. A rare signed copy thus. Three of the most brilliant American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER SIGRID NUNEZ, SUSAN SONTAG, AND DAVID RIEFF TITLES IN OUR CATALOG). ISBN 1935633228.

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