This was both more and less interesting than I expected it to be. Coming hot off a widely discussed New Yorker article that also delves into the non-typical living arrangements and relationships of a woman intellectual whom many consider deeply unlikable, I was sort of expecting to think more about “genius” and social conventions, and the idea of role models/mentors, especially in relation to women writers. That’s not what this book was doing — which isn’t to its detriment, necessarily, though it’s what I wanted to think more about.
Really, this is a book about Susan Sontag. Who, I confess, I’m not that interested in, though I realize that I should be. Kristen Stewart definitely makes me more interested, which I probably shouldn’t admit. But Sontag wasn’t a big part of my own intellectual development, at least, not directly. I read Illness as Metaphor in college (not because it was assigned to me, but as part of an independent study I did on illness and lifewriting, where I read anything and everything that I thought I should) and dimly recognized that it was important; I followed it up with AIDS and its Metaphors and failed to appreciate its importance (wasn’t she just rewriting the first book but swapping in AIDS? said stupid baby me); and then I picked up Regarding the Pain of Others during my first semester of grad school when I was writing a paper on Plato and photography (two topics I knew very little about…), and thought it was quite good, and interestingly between academia and public writing. That’s pretty much it though. I definitely read “Notes on Camp” at various points along the way, and never really felt like I understood it. I’ve never read Against Interpretation, or any of her fiction (I remember seeing Volcano Lover on my parents’ bookshelf and I think my mom said she enjoyed it?). I suspect that part of the gap here is that US culture and history of the 70s is like, a big blank spot for me — I know very little about it, and feel absolutely no personal connection to it. I think for most people my age, it’s the culture their parents were a part of, but my parents weren’t in the US yet, so it’s just this other world. I dunno. I’m only slowly beginning to remedy that.
Anyways, so this book is really a memoir of Sontag and what she was like, and a sort of grappling with how she was represented or talked about. It was actually kind of shocking to me, in that it seemed like a somewhat monstrous invasion of privacy — not that this is new, of course; Terry Castle’s Sontag essay is too, and maybe Sontag herself craved this kind of celebrity, and sure, everyone is entitled to write about their own lives, whatever. Nonetheless. It’s not so much the bits where she comes across as a jerk, as the quiet moments at home, like her (to me slightly appalling) eating habits. It’s just so deeply personal, while disclosing very little about Nunez herself, that it felt cruel. And again, part of the point is that it exposes Sontag’s own cruelty, and selfishness, yes. But it doesn’t seem like that’s really the point. But neither is it not the point — Nunez isn’t mining the relationship, or the experiences, for some broader understanding. This is the auto-theory/fiction gambit, I guess — this closely observed, yet simultaneously detached, recounting of experience. I do enjoy this kind of thing, but it also feels a little empty, a little like the author is evading the task of actually saying something. Interestingly, the prose and overall style is very similar to the fiction I’ve read by Nunez, and I find it far more interesting when it is a fiction, rather than an account of an actual known person. This is striking to me, because I had the exact opposite feeling recently about Annie Ernaux’s Simple Passion — I had assumed that it was straightforwardly a memoir, and when someone told me that she had read it thinking it was fiction, and hated it, I thought, yes, of course, I would have hated it if it were a novel. Something to ponder…
Kasia Reads 