MOLI VIEW™

Memoir writing is a tricky biz these days, especially with all the phonies getting big book deals. It seems that, if you don't have the chops to write about the intricacies and profundities of your own life (and all lives are intricate and profound), all you have to do is pilfer somebody else's — preferably someone with a nasty drug habit or a gangland past.

But it becomes clear early in Susanna Sonnenberg's Her Last Death that this character, her mother, is the real deal. You couldn't invent a creature as complex as "Daphne" – and you probably wouldn't want to. Her selfishness and vanity are exhausting.

In this, her first book, Sonnenberg tells of an eccentric upbringing in New York City; Taos, New Mexico; the boarding schools of Colorado; and numerous points in-between. Her bohemian parents (a writer/intellectual father and sexual libertine/drug addict/gadabout mother) drag "Sue" and her little sister "Penelope" through life like a couple of rag dolls — an audience for his pomposity and her maniacal need for attention.

When the girls are still very young, the couple divorces, leaving Sue and Penelope in Daphne's unstable care. As is the case in most "Mommy" memoirs, Susanna assumes the role of parent — scrutinizing carefully her mother's ability to control men with her beauty, and everybody else with her charm. The child, not yet in her teens, becomes nursemaid, chum and confidant to Daphne who shares with her, among other things, cocaine, details of sexual exploits, occasional physical and verbal abuse and waves of convoluted, compulsive lies. Predictably, Sue spends the rest of her time trying to protect Penelope from the perverse combination of dread and unhinged exuberance that permeates their lives.

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