WITHOUT METAPHOR
By Katie Roihpe writing in The New York Times February 3, 2008

One can’t say Susan Sontag died a particularly private death. She once declared she wouldn’t tell her readers “what it is really like to emigrate to the kingdom of the ill and live there,” but it seems other people were determined to do it for her. The latest glimpse we have of her sickbed is “Swimming in a Sea of Death,” David Rieff’s intelligent, disordered account of his mother’s final illness.

Pic - Jeffrey Scales/HSP Archive
Susan Sontag with her son, David Rieff, November 1976.

SWIMMING IN A SEA OF DEATH
A Son’s Memoir.
By David Rieff.
180 pp. Simon & Schuster. $21.

It is perhaps surprising that Rieff objects violently to the frank and controversial photographs that Annie Leibovitz took of his mother as she was dying. He writes that Sontag was “humiliated posthumously” by Leibovitz’s “carnival images of celebrity death.”

Rieff himself seems to have made a compromise with the business of intimate revelation; in his indirection one feels the tastefulness, the reserve of the reluctant or ambivalent memoirist. His images of his mother are vague, a figure weeping in another room; if they were sketches, they would be rendered in a charcoal smudge. We see her underlining a pamphlet put out by the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, but we do not see her illness itself in any detail. Rieff tells us he is not taking notes during her final months (which echoes Leibovitz’s assertion that she stopped taking pictures during that same time). He tells us, in one elliptical passage, that “she might be covered in sores, incontinent and half delirious,” but he does not want to write straightforwardly that she is.

Full review.