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.
Mothers who sexually abusing their children are rare and Sonnenbergs’ mother didn’t molest her in the traditional sense, what Daphne did was parade endless men into her bedroom, share the most vulgar details with her daughters about her sexual behaviour with these men, mock Sonnenberg for remaining a virgin and preying on her daughters boyfriends, manipulating and claiming to have sex with them then providing full details of what they did to her between the sheets.
Sonnenberg bravely recounts a life of empty one night stands, hollow relationships with men that become merely exchanges of bodily fluids and the degradation and despair this existence breeds in her; the profound damage done to her self-respect and sexual boundaries by a poisonous mother brought her life finally to a barren halt. With her spirit hollowed out, Sonnenberg limps to Montana with her boyfriend, whom she marries and builds a life and family with and struggles daily to heal and rebuild the tatters of herself. What I found most staggering in its courage is the last few chapters of this memoir with Sonnenberg becoming a mother herself and battling with the demons that her mother bestowed upon her. The demons of learning to trust herself when touching her young children, that her touch is safe and will not harm her sons and defining appropriate sexual boundaries and behaviour within her own family.
Her Last Death is a devastating grave yard of stolen innocence, betrayal, lies, addiction and shattered faith, this is what Sonnenberg has inherited from a mother who wished only oblivion and sought all manner of destruction, herself and her daughters’. Because the value of art is to be transformative, the detente of this memoir ends on a hopeful note, one that tells the abused in this world that you may be beaten and battered and limping but, you can still build a life of love and forgiveness that is shaped uniquely by your own hand.
Susanna Sonnenberg is a stunningly talented writer and with anticipation I await her next masterpiece.
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