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.”
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.
Create an account with the same email registered to your subscription to unlock access.
-
Georgia's new foreign influence billUnder the Radar Critics claim the 'Russian law' could stifle dissent and wreck the country's chances of joining the EU
-
'Making a police state out of the liberal university'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
8 looming climate tipping points that imperil our planetThe Explainer New reports detail the thresholds we may be close to crossing
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”