Me neither.
But Susanna Sonnenberg says she did, in the wild and appalling ride that was life with the mother she dubs "Daphne" in her memoir, "Her Last Death."
But her parents quickly separated, divorcing when she was in second grade, and Sonnenberg's mother spiraled into drug abuse, multiple affairs and epic, incomprehensibly cruel lies. In compelling, often lyrical prose, Sonnenberg lays out a life that is a schizophrenic mix of privilege and privation.
She shops at Bonwit's - velvet party dresses and Mary Janes; attends auctions at Sotheby's ("We scoffed at Christie's"); jets to Barbados. Many names are dropped, others only dangled. Claudette Colbert. "The boys from 'Monty Python.' " "Mick." "The very famous lyricist" - with whom Daphne inevitably sleeps. (Her life in Montana, where Sonnenberg abandons her trust fund and lives on the money she earns herself, is presented as both redemption and a bit of a shock.)
That glittering surface is scarred by scenes like this: Susanna awakens to a nearly bare refrigerator. She makes Jell-O for breakfast for her little sister, so amusing her mother in the process that Daphne's hysterical laughter turns into a seizure.
"Her tongue was swelling where her teeth had snapped together, and blood pooled in her mouth and ran down her chin. I wiped the floor with a paper towel and her chin with my hand, listening for my sister's approach. I didn't want her to see our mother with her face slack or smell the dead smell of her breath. This was our intimacy, me so necessary." Susanna was 10.
By then, her mother had already given her Penthouse to read. At 12, she and her mother drink Bellinis in Venice; in her freshman year of boarding school, Daphne urges her to get fitted for a diaphragm.
"This is insane," Susanna writes in her diary. "It's insane that I'm used to cocaine and lovers and sex."
It is insane. It also makes for riveting, if queasy, reading.
But take away the glamour - the Charles Jourdan high-heeled sandals, the trips to Tangier and Greece, the hobnobbing with name-drop-ees - all the varnish that gives this sordid tale its gloss. Imagine Sonnenberg and her mother in, say, a trailer up on the Hi-Line, a North Philly rowhouse, a shotgun shack in New Orleans, and suddenly they're candidates for the coke version of those lurid Montana Meth Project ads.
You want to scream: Where's Child and Family Services? The teacher, the neighbor, the relative who sees what's going on and intervenes? Heck, where's her dad? (We find out, in a long oh of understanding.) Money may have protected Sonnenberg in some ways - a grandmother pays for psychotherapy, the trust fund obviates the need to hold a steady job. But in others, it seems to have done more harm than good, letting her family wrap itself in the label of "eccentric" that cocoons the rich where the rest of us would have been termed crazy and, in this case, probably criminal besides.
And there's another thing: Throughout the book, Sonnenberg is relentless in exposing her mother's outrageous lies.
But Daphne isn't the book's only slippery character. Sonnenberg starts "Her Last Death" with an early morning phone call reporting her mother's near-death in a traffic accident on Barbados, a scenario worthy of Daphne's oeuvre, except in this case, it was actually true. Sonnenberg agonizes over whether to rush to her mother's side, and finally gives herself permission to stay away.
"Have you thought about how you'd feel if you don't say goodbye?" her sister asks.
Now there's a reason to keep reading: What could possibly have been so monstrous as to keep a daughter from her mother's deathbed? The next 260 pages, in which Sonnenberg boldly discloses her own misbehavior along with Daphne's, make her case. But only in the book's final pages do we discover that the initial anecdote was ... well, let's just say a crucial detail was omitted.
A nifty bit of trickery on Sonnenberg's part, one that feels familiar, downright Daphnesque. The book comes with a disclaimer. "This is a work of memoir and subject to the imperfections of memory" - fair enough - that ends with "I have changed all the names but my own to emphasize that this story could only be mine."
Memoirs have taken some hits in the last few years, most notably when James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" was revealed to be a million little fictions. Incidents like that detract from literary gems like Mary Karr's "The Liar's Club." Thing is, according to the Christian Science Monitor, Karr asked people to sign releases stating that her recollections were accurate. It shouldn't be necessary to do that. But it would also be nice to read a memoir without the nag of doubt.
In Sonnenberg's memoir, the writing is gorgeous. The book is nearly impossible to put down. And you can make up your own mind about its reliability.
Besides, once you've read it, you'll have a whole new appreciation for cake and ice cream - vanilla, preferably - on your birthday.
Reading
Susanna Sonnenberg will read from and sign “Her Last Death: A Memoir” at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Fact & Fiction, 220 N. Higgins Ave., Missoula.Contact assistant city editor Gwen Florio at 523-5268, or gwen.florio@missoulian.com.
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