David Rieff’s sincere and honest memoir of his mother’s months of dying of cancer, which had ravaged her for decades is, I’m afraid, a book that could have been written of many dyings. Sontag feared ‘extinction’, searched relentlessly for cures and doctors, endured pain, feared being alone, and required constant expressions of hope from her entourage. As Rieff says, she regretted ‘not having known how to be happier in the present, where by her own admission [by now he had read her journals] her private life was a source of sorrow and frustration’. I feel David Rieff is right to say that his mother had been ‘humiliated posthumously by being “memorialised” in those carnival images of celebrity death taken by Annie Leibovitz’.

In his introduction to the journal, Rieff says that his mother longed to become ‘a person of significance’. This seems to mean of significance to a few others — her mother, lovers, a few friends, in New York, Oxford, Paris, Athens or Florence. But it was only after her death, her son writes, that ‘I was overwhelmed by the sense of how often and how profoundly she had been unhappy’.

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