One of Sigrid Nunez’s most intimate books is Siempre Susan, in which she recounts her long and winding friendship with Susan Sontag.
Sigrid arrived at apartment 340 on Riverside Drive in the spring of 1976, when Susan was recovering from breast cancer, was 43 years old, and needed help organizing documents, answering letters, and returning to literary life:
“Something shocking: when I first saw her, she looked older than she turned out to be as I got to know her. As she regained her health, she seemed younger and younger.”
In a short time, she went from assistant to confidante, friend, tenant, and lover of Susan’s son, David. Their closeness allowed them to develop a disparate correspondence, in which Susan was a mentor, a demanding roommate, communicative, and uninhibited about the privacy of her son’s relationship.
And Sigrid, a learner of everything, in love, a wanderer, a listener, and a witness to conversations with Joseph Brodsky and Edward Said, got to know one of the most interesting and controversial American literary figures of the late 20th and early 21st centuries up close. This closeness is naturally reflected in the book, even during the periods of estrangement that the two women experienced over almost thirty years, until Susan’s death in 2004.
Sigrid obtained a private portrait of the author of On the Pain of Others. She wrote of her:
“After her hair, the feature of Susan that most surprised people was her beautiful big smile.”
She also sketched her thus:
“Despite all her passions, her immense appetite for beauty and pleasure, her famous greed, and the tireless rhythm of an intense life that could arouse envy, she was mortally dissatisfied, and hers was not a restlessness that could be cured by travel. And despite her undeniable achievements, all the honors she had earned through hard work and well-deserved praise, the feeling of failure clung to her like a widow’s mourning.”
