Review: A biographer gently pulls back the curtain on Susan Sontag
The young woman who would become Susan Sontag, one of the 20th century’s most visible American public intellectuals, wrote constantly about her life in private, in diaries.
Moser’s Sontag is someone he works to understand as both a girl forever in love with her beautiful, alcoholic, widow mother and a woman who regularly castigated herself for not already being who she wanted to be, as if her ambition made a liar of her. She was regularly underslept as she hoped always to write a little more than she had, and as accomplished as she was, she died before she felt she had accomplished her final ambitions.
Moser also finds in her a Zelig-like knack for being an eyewitness to some of the most significant events in 20th century history: postwar Los Angeles; the queer underground scene of San Francisco in the 1940s; the University of Chicago and Harvard in the 1950s; the start of the Cuban revolution; Vietnam during the war; Israel during the war;
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