Published in: July-August 2011 issue.
Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag
by Sigrid Nunez
Atlas & Co. 144 pages, $20.
IN 1976, armed with an MFA from Columbia and in need of an odd job to supplement her free-lance writing, Sigrid Nunez accepted a position as Susan Sontag’s assistant. Sontag had appealed to The New York Review of Books for someone who’d help her catch up on correspondence that had accumulated during the time she’d undergone treatment for breast cancer. At that time, she was also writing Illness as Metaphor, published in 1978.
