Her Last Death A Memoir [Paperback]

Her Last Deathbegins as the phone rings early one morning in the Montana house where Susanna Sonnenberg lives with her husband and two young sons. Her aunt is calling to tell Susanna her mother is in a coma after a car accident. She might not live. Any daughter would rush the thousands of miles to her mother's bedside. But Susanna cannot bring herself to go. Her courageous memoir explains why.

Glamorous, charismatic and a compulsive liar, Susanna's mother seduced everyone who entered her orbit. With outrageous behavior and judgment tinged by drug use, she taught her child the art of sex and the benefits of lying. Susanna struggled to break out of this compelling world, determined, as many daughters are, not to become her mother.

Sonnenberg mines tender and startling memories as she writes of her fierce resolve to forge her independence, to become a woman capable of trust and to be a good mother to her own children.Her Last Deathis riveting, disarming and searingly beautiful.Questions for Discussion
1.Her Last Deathopens with the report of Daphne's car accident in Barbados and the author's decision not to go to her. Readers have the rest of the book to contemplate Susanna's choice while learning about the family history behind it. Near the book's end Sonnenberg writes, What kind of person doesn't go to her mother's deathbed?....I didn't go because I couldn't. That's what had become of us (p. 268). Did you agree with Sonnenberg's decision? Did your feeling about her choice change after she unfolded the story of her childhood and adolescence with her mother?
2. When Susanna meets her English teacher Wyatt for the first time Daphne tells her, He adores you....Trust me...[t]he world is about sex (p. 112). Susanna loses her virginity to Wyatt when she is sixteen and engages in a lengthy affair with him. She subsequently spends many years having sex with everybody. I used to court oblivion, cancel everything, forget trlÃ"