Author of the week

last updated 8 January 2015

David Rieff’s mother, the writer Susan Sontag, set “a new benchmark” for what it means to die a “bad death,” said Abigail Zuger in The New York Times. Rieff’s “short and immensely disturbing” new memoir, Swimming in a Sea of Death, captures it all. Rieff was with Sontag in the spring of 2004, when a doctor informed her that she had an untreatable form of blood cancer. He was with her when she announced that she preferred risking a long-shot bone marrow transplant even though her suffering was likely to be intense. He was by her side constantly after the transplant failed, when his mother, who had always despised self-delusion, refused to let anyone acknowledge that death was imminent. “She suffered like someone being tortured,” he says. “Her body was just a sore from the inside of her mouth to her toes.”

It pained Rieff that her willfulness meant that he “never got to say goodbye,” said Steve Paulson in Salon.com. But he objects to the idea that there are “bad” deaths. His mother, he says, was “someone who desperately didn’t want to die. Why should she have made our lives easier by going gracefully?” Her stubborn denial meant that she left her son no instructions about how to handle her remains. But Rieff arranged for her to be buried in the Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris, near other literary greats. “She spoke a lot during her life about how horrified of cremation she was,” he says. “Cremation seemed to confirm extinction.”