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philosophy at the University of Oxford, which she
also hated. (“There is a type—the male virgin—lots
of them in England,” she complained. Also, the
weather was bad.) When she left “boring Oxford”
in 1957, first for France, then for New York, she em-
barked on the most productive period of her life.
New Left publications like The New York Review of
Books and The Partisan Review championed her. In
1963, she published her first novel, The Benefactor,
and one year later “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” a list of
playful, exhilarating observations about camp as
a sensibility, and its “love of the unnatural: of ar-
tifice and exaggeration.” The essay landed her in
Time magazine, where she was identified as “one of
Manhattan’s brightest young intellectuals,” trans-
forming her from a mere essayist into “a midcult
commodity,” according to Nora Ephron. “Notes
on ‘Camp’ ” was followed, in rapid succession, by
Against Interpretation (1966), Death Kit (1967), and
Styles of Radical Will (1969), all published before
her 37th birthday.
But the more Sontag wrote, the more she fret-
ted about writing. Periods of intense productivity
were interspersed with periods of “lacerating in-
securities,” Moser writes. After expressing dis-
dain for the “exclusive ness, the possessiveness
of marriage,” she spent the 1960s and ’70s in a
series of devastating entanglements with women:a downtown party girl, a European duchess, a
modern dancer, a film maker. “There is something
Olympian about her sex life,” Moser opines. “How
many American women of her generation had lov-
ers, male and female, as numerous, beautiful, and
prominent?” Her affairs left her in childlike states of
bewilderment, shattered and sleepless. Overly pos-
sessive of her son, she “groomed him as a compan-
ion,” clutching David closer than a mother should.
As she entered her 40s, her friends “remarked that
she was even more than usually insensitive to oth-
ers, more prone to fabrication.”
Yet Sontag’s lack of awareness and her in security
were almost never on public display—not when, at
42, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, not when
chemotherapy turned her hair white. She dyed
all but a front shock black and finished two books
during her treatments: On Photography and Illness
as Metaphor (1978), the latter of which railed against
psychological accounts of cancer as a disease of “re-
pression” without ever mentioning her cancer. Her
illness prompted her to reevaluate her youthful
leftism. She broke with the New Left in 1982, at a
Town Hall event where she denounced commu-
nism, flanked by one of the great loves of her life,
the morose Soviet dissident Joseph Brodsky. “She
became a liberal,” Moser writes, and as she entered
her 50s, the pace of her writing slowed. Intermit-
tently estranged from her son, who was installed
as her editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, she did
not produce another book, aside from a collection
of essays, until AIDS and Its Metaphors, in 1989. She
finished it as she tended to a friend dying of AIDS.
The year the book came out, she met her last
love, the photographer Annie Leibovitz. They spent
the final decade and a half of Sontag’s life living like
divas in their extravagant New York apartments,
Sontag loving and abusing Leibovitz—“You’re so
dumb,” she would yell—while also traveling the
world. During the Bosnian war, Sontag and Lei-
bovitz went to Sarajevo, where the couple became
what Sontag, in her last book, Regarding the Pain of
Others (2003), called “star witnesses” to the ethnic
cleansing in Bosnia. Eager to capture the despair of
waiting for international intervention, she arrived
with a script of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The production, with a set made from United Na-
tions plastic sheeting, “became a cultural event in
the highest sense of the term,” Moser writes in all
earnestness. Sontag returned to Sarajevo often be-
fore her death from cancer, in 2004. Her last words,
to her son, “I want to tell you ...,” revealed that she
still had things to say.
Moser packs in an extraordinary amount of
detail. Yet the book feels strangely vacuous, or at
least no more psychologically revealing than ei-
ther Sontag’s diaries or the earlier unauthorized
biography by Carl Rollyson and Lisa Paddock.
Aptly enough, the problem is one of interpretation.BOOKSSontag’s lack
of awareness
and her
insecurity
were almost
never on
public display.