Book of the week: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 by Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag's journals offer an “extraordinary” window on a singular woman, said Katie Roiphe in Slate.com.
A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
Thank you for signing up to TheWeek. You will receive a verification email shortly.
There was a problem. Please refresh the page and try again.
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963
by Susan Sontag
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 304 pages, $24)
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Susan Sontag was not a typical teenager. Yes, the future novelist and essayist experienced dizzying infatuations. (“The Magic Mountain is the finest novel I’ve ever read,” she wrote in her diary at 15.) She also disdained her elders. (James Joyce, she noted in a later journal, was “so stupid.”) But Sontag was a peculiar prodigy: At 16, she was already a university freshman and certain of the adult intellectual she wanted to become. That year, she was “reborn,” as she put it, by her first sexual experience with a woman: “I know what I want to do with my life,” she wrote hours later. “I intend to do everything … everything matters! … I am alive ... I am beautiful … what else is there?”
That galvanizing passage is “moving on several levels,” said Sam Anderson in New York. The Sontag the public knew years later was as avid about life and learning as her teenage self, but otherwise she had failed to fulfill her expectations. At 16, she thought bisexuality would be easy. At 17, she married sociologist Philip Rieff and found marriage untenable. At 16, she vowed not to “worship knowledge.” By 30, she was a widely read “high priestess of knowledge-worship,” soon to become “America’s reigning intellectual.” What remains most constant throughout this first published volume of her journals is Sontag’s determination to create, through hard work and self-criticism, a public persona impervious to all arrows. “Against all odds,” that effort makes the Sontag of Reborn “a deeply lovable character.”
Reborn is by no means an autobiography, said Deborah Eisenberg in The New York Review of Books. Because Sontag was writing for herself, the narrative of her life from age 14 to 30 “often disappears behind a cloud.” She meets Rieff, marries him, and raises their son to age 4 in roughly three isolated sentences. What readers get instead are lists of habits to acquire and books to read, long passages on numerous affairs with women, bursts of sharp critical opinions, and always that “unhesitating sense of purpose.” It makes for an “extraordinary” window on a singular woman, said Katie Roiphe in Slate.com. “How is it possible,” you wonder, “that anyone is this self-conscious?” And “how is it possible that this degree of self-consciousness could be so fruitful?”
Continue reading for free
We hope you're enjoying The Week's refreshingly open-minded journalism.
Subscribed to The Week? Register your account with the same email as your subscription.
Sign up to our 10 Things You Need to Know Today newsletter
A free daily digest of the biggest news stories of the day - and the best features from our website
-
The Tory tribes vying for influence at this year's party conference
The Explainer From free-market ultras to culture warriors, the party's electoral coalition is starting to fracture
By The Week Staff Published
-
5 destinations to visit this fall
The Week Recommends Have a frightfully good time in Sleepy Hollow or enjoy the foliage in Asheville
By Catherine Garcia Published
-
Nuclear drills: Putin urged to test atomic bomb
Speed Reads Russian rescue workers practise evacuating citizens as nuclear expert urges 'show of force'
By Rebekah Evans, The Week UK Published