A fascinating document of Sontag's apprenticeship, charting her earnest quest for education, identity, and voice . . . What slowly emerges . . . is a sense of Sontag's ferocious will. . . . She wanted to be a writer and would do almost anything to make that happen.” —Darryl Pinckney, The New Yorker
“A portrait of the artist as a young omnivore, an earnest, tirelessly self-inspecting thinker fashioning herself into the phenomenon she will be . . . Her journal is her true first book, the story of a woman struggling with her consciousness.” —Richard Lacayo, Time magazine
“A revelation . . . As do all the best critics, Sontag gave us new metaphors for how to read and see. Fabulously, surprisingly, Reborn shows she used that skill to understand her own pell-mell life.” —John Freeman, NPR.org
“What's fascinating . . . is that the journal reveals and adolescent and, later, a young woman, in whom 'ambition'—in this case, an overpowering yearning to be surrounded by and immersed in literature and culture—vastly outeweighed, and seems to have overpowered, 'sexuality.' As she herself puts it in the last entry of this journal, 'intellectual wanting' was the equal of 'sexual wanting' ” —Daniel Mendelsohn, The New Republic
The first of three planned volumes of Sontag's private journals, this book is extraordinary for all the reasons we would expect from Sontag's writing-extreme seriousness, stunning authority, intolerance toward mediocrity; Sontag's vulnerability throughout will also utterly surprise the late critic and novelist's fans and detractors. At 15, when these journals began, Sontag (1933-2004) already displayed her ferocious intellect and hunger for experience and culture, though what is most remarkable here is watching Sontag grow into one of the century's leading minds. In these carefully selected excerpts (many passages are only a few lines), Sontag details her developing thoughts, her voluminous reading and daily movie-going, her life as a teenage college student at Berkeley discovering her sexuality ("bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual"), and meeting and marrying her professor Philip Rieff, with whom, at the age of 18, she had David, her only child. Most powerful are the entries corresponding to her years in England and Europe, when, apart from Philip and their son, the marriage broke down and Sontag entered intense lesbian relationships that would compel her to rethink her notions of sex, love ("physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly, important to me") and daughter- and motherhood, and all before the age of 30. Watching Sontag become herself is nothing short of cathartic. (Dec.)
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Sontag's son Rieff (A Bed for the Night), who served as his mother's editor until her death in 2004, has edited the first of what is to be a three-volume set of her journals-some of which were originally excerpted in the New York Times(e.g., "On Self"). It is fascinating-and sometimes distressing-to see Sontag's intense and often excoriating appraisal of herself: "No matter what I have said...my actions say...that I have not wanted the truth." The entries have been selected for "the rawness and the unvarnished portrait...of...a young person, who self-consciously and determinately went about creating the self she wanted to be"; and as Rieff puts it, "to say these diaries are self-revelatory is a drastic understatement...[my] mother was not in any way a self-revealing person." Recommended for literary collections in medium to large academic and public libraries; an optional purchase for others. [See Prepub Alert, LJ8/08.]
—Felicity D. Walsh
