A Mentor by Nature

by Lauretta Charlton

I read Sempre Susan in one sitting, enthralled. You can never fully anticipate a book having that sort of impact on you, but when it does, it’s hard to ignore. Sigrid Nunez is unsparingly honest about her experience with Susan Sontag, and this creates a queasy tension in the reader: I felt embarrassed for Sontag, a woman who, despite her fierce intellect, could be petty and odd. She could also be authoritarian, unforgiving and without sympathy. And sometimes I resented Nunez for portraying her this way.

It’s interesting to be made to feel like shit by the person you’ve wanted to impress most. That kind of relationship has a funny way of making us learn more about ourselves.
 
When I worked in book publishing I was more self-conscious than I’ve ever been in my entire adult life. I was the only black person in the editorial department. Never mind that most of the peers I was surrounded by all seemed to maintain an auspiciously comfortable lifestyle despite earning a salary so small it hurts me to even think about it. It didn’t matter. I had something to prove and I knew exactly how I would do it: I would work for the most hard-nosed, no-bullshit, “everyone hold your breath, omg she’s coming” editor in the book business. That’s how I would prove my mettle.

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“There’s hope for you, too:” an excerpt from Sempre Susan

Over the years, I have met or learned about a surprising number of people who said it was reading Susan Sontag when they were young that had made them want to be writers. Although this was not true of me, her influence on how I think and write has been profound. By the time I got to know her, I was already out of school, but I’d been a mostly indifferent, highly distracted student, and the gaps in my knowledge were huge. Though she hadn’t grown up in New York, she was far more of a New Yorker than I, who’d always lived there, and you could have had no better guide to the city’s cultural life than she. Small wonder I considered meeting her one of the luckiest strokes of my life. It’s quite possible that, in time, I’d have discovered on my own such writers as John Berger and Walter Benjamin and E. M. Cioran and Simone Weil. But the fact remains, I learned about them first from her. Though I’m sure she was often dismayed to discover what I hadn’t read, how much I didn’t know, she did not make me feel ashamed. Among other things, she understood what it was like to come from a place where there were few books and no intellectual spirit or guidance. She said, “You and I didn’t have what David’s been able to take for granted from birth.”

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