The Unholy Practice

A biography as unillusioned about Susan Sontag as she was about herself.

- Janet Malcolm

Two volumes of Susan Sontag’s diaries, edited by her son, David Rieff, have been published, and a third is forthcoming. In the preface to the first volume, published in 2008, under the title “Reborn,” Rieff confesses his uncertainty about the project. He reports that at the time of her death, in 2004, Sontag had given no instructions about the dozens of notebooks that she had been filling with her private thoughts since adolescence and which she kept in a closet in her bedroom. “Left to my own devices,” he writes, “I would have waited a long time before publishing them, or perhaps never published them at all.” But because Sontag had sold her papers to the University of California at Los Angeles, and access to them was largely unrestricted, “either I would organize them and present them or someone else would,” so “it seemed better to go forward.” However, he writes, “my misgivings remain. To say that these diaries are self-revelatory is a drastic understatement.”