Book Review: Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg

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If you're able to leave room for unintentional embellishment and the unavoidable evolution of the author, then the memoir genre can be an enriching reading experience and Her Last Death by Susanna Sonnenberg fits that description. This memoir is an unsentimental, brutally unblinking look at Sonnenbergs relationship with her mother, a woman who can only be described as diabolical.

The story is told in vignettes, out of sequence and out of time order but the narrative still flows like a mild creek on a fall day, cold, shocking and refreshing. Daphne is the mothers name and it's a story of a mother's character ravaged by every addiction imaginable: sex, drugs and alcohol. Daphne devours her own daughters psyche, spends years reducing her own child to a sexual object to be used and discarded, introduces and encourages a life without love, only physical gratification and creates a world of such shadowy lies, it becomes impossible to know what dimension of delusions Daphne exists. One particularly disturbing lie Sonnenbergs mother tells more than once was claiming to have been raped; it requires deep dimensions of mental illness for a mother to intentionally dump such a burden into her daughters lap and then lie about all the details, changing them as the days and years pass and then pretending that everything is fine.

As if having a mother addicted to pain killers, narcotics and alcohol isn't bad enough, Daphne gave her daughter cocaine while Sonnenberg was an adolescent. Try as you might to believe this but, this episode of attacking your own child's innocence is merely a drop in the ocean of darkness that her two children were raised in. It seemed to me Daphne's entire life goal was the theft of her eldest daughters girlhood in the most appalling ways one can imagine; sexual corruption, drugs, alcohol, physical violence, perpetual lying, sabotage and emotional abandonment.