Sempre Susan

IT WAS MY first time ever going to a writers colony, and, for some reason I no longer recall, I had to postpone the date on which I was supposed to arrive. I was concerned that arriving late would be frowned on. But Susan insisted this was not a bad thing. It s always good to start off anything by breaking a rule. For her, arriving late was the rule. The only time I worry about being late is for a plane or for the opera. When people complained about always having to wait for her, she was unapologetic. I figure, if people aren t smart enough to bring along something to read . . . (But when certain people wised up and she ended up having to wait for them, she was not pleased.)

My own fastidious punctuality could get on her nerves. Out to lunch with her one day, realizing I was going to be late getting back to work, I jumped up from the table, and she scoffed, Sit down! You don t have to be there on the dot. Don t be so servile. Servile was one of her favorite words.

       

Exceptionalism. Was it really a good idea for the three of us Susan, her son, myself to share the same household? Shouldn t David and I get a place of our own? She said she saw no reason why we couldn t all go on living together, even if David and I were to have a child. She d gladly support us all if she had to, she said. And when I expressed doubts: Don t be so conventional. Who says we have to live like everyone else?

(Once, on St. Mark s Place, she pointed out two eccentric-looking women, one middle-aged, the other elderly, both dressed like gypsies and with long, flowing gray hair. Old bohemians, she said. And she added, jokingly, Us in thirty years.

More than thirty years have passed, and she is dead, and there is no bohemia anymore.)

       

She was forty-three when we met, but she seemed very old to me. This was partly because I was

Sigrid Nunez has published six critically acclaimed novels, including The Friend, The Last of Her Kind and Salvation City. She has contributed to The New York Times, Harper s, and McSweeney s, among many others. She lives in New York City.

"A fresh and touching book [Nunez s] genuine curiosity about her own experience her memories of love lost, youth and youth lost is the quality that gives this book an elegant, almost compulsive readability." The New York Review of Books

"A loving memoir, full of arresting details and an occasionally spirited defense of her mentor Sontag [once] remarked that all her work says be serious, be passionate, wake up. Clearly someone was listening." The Los Angeles Times

"Susan Sontag roars to life As magnetic and complicated as Sontag herself, Nunez s homage is both critical and compassionate [an] elegantly crafted chronicle of a young writer s artistic education." Vanity Fair

"Nunez, an uncompromising talent in her own right, offers the most vibrant and multifaceted portrait of Sontag to date." Vogue

"Nunez has constructed a eulogy that mythologizes and humanizes one of the most intimidating figures of contemporary culture." The Boston Globe

"Sempre Susan doesn t just evoke Susan Sontag, the person, with hard-won sympathy, insight, and cool; it contains (in a very tiny space) material for an entire novel of idealism and disillusionment .this memoir captures the spirit of her times." The Paris Review, Staff Picks

"Sontag once wrote about feeling estranged from the Susan Sontag who stood on the spine of the books she had written. In Nunez s Sempre Susan, the gap between the writer and the person who wrote the books is made all the more vividly real a reminder of the extraordinary transformative work that goes into writing in the first place." Slate

"Nunez, now a fine novelist, has written a clear-eyed tribute With an eye for the telling detail, this intimate and occasionally raw portrait makes it plain that despite all Sontag s public renown, much of her was entirely mysterious." The Economist

"A wonderful novelist remembers Susan Sontag as a writer, mentor, woman, friend and enthusiastic lover of a vanished New York." Katha Pollitt, The Nation