My Amazon and Goodreads review of Sontag: Her Life and Work by Benjamin Moser (Rating 5) – Deft Interweaving. Benjamin Moser’s personal and bibliographic biography of Sontag: Her Life and Work deftly interweaves these two inextricable facets of a literary and cultural icon. I was most engaged reading about Sontag’s life, but also impressed by Moser’s insights into its influence on her work. As a developmental psychologist specializing in how childhood and families shape the people we become, I appreciated Moser’s thorough research, compilation of myriad perspectives, and comprehensive interpretations, even when I occasionally questioned them. As a writer (see my Amazon author page and Goodreads author page), I found his analysis of “metaphor,” the theme Sontag continually returned to, lucid and provocative. Writers strive for the perfect metaphor to illuminate reality and bring a person, object, or event to life. The irony, as Sontag repeatedly cautions, is that metaphor can distance us from reality. It’s an insoluble dilemma, which is why it proved such a rich vein (metaphor alert) for Sontag’s life’s work.
