Like Mother, Like Daughter

HER LAST DEATH

A Memoir

By Susanna Sonnenberg

Scribner. 273 pp. $24

Reading "Her Last Death" by Susanna Sonnenberg has been like spending three days in a monkey house. Sonnenberg, who says she changed all names but her own in this freaky memoir, explains why, when her mother lay in a coma after a terrible car accident and was "probably going to die," Susanna, herself a loving mother of two beautiful boys and wife to an honest husband, living an intensely plain, minimum-wage existence in Missoula, Mont., just couldn't find it in her heart to journey to her mother's deathbed in Barbados. To be fair, Susanna may have had more than enough reasons to stay away.

Daphne, Susanna's mother, very beautiful, seductive and at times affectionate, was also at times a lying, cheating, shoplifting cocaine addict and pill-head who once locked the teenage Susanna out of a hotel room in Oaxaca, leaving her to walk darkened streets and almost get raped. On Susanna's 16th birthday, Daphne took her and her sister, Penelope, out to a Western bar for margaritas, observed that Susanna fancied the drummer in the band and promised to bring him home later so that Susanna could lose her virginity as a birthday present. But then Daphne had sex with the drummer herself, making sure to leave the door open.

Too bad Bette Davis isn't still alive. You remember those old movies where the great scene-chomping actresses got to play both the good twin and the evil twin who yelled at each other by means of (fairly primitive) special effects? Well, as a movie, "Her Last Death" would enable some heavy-breathing actress to star in three roles, one as the gorgeous, ape-crazy mother, and then two more as the totally self-absorbed, sexually competitive, equally beautiful daughters, all duking it out for -- what? For who's going to get center stage, the most attention, the drummer in the band.

Of course, the author doesn't portray herself in quite that manner. She sees herself from the beginning as an innocent, loving type. After Penelope's birth, she remembers, "My little sister howled except when I carried her around. . . . When Penelope could stay upright, I sat her in the dirt of our communal back garden and played with her. . . . I gathered her up when our nurse called us in." But the Eden of Penelope and Susanna's childhood seems to have been tainted. "Bob Dylan lived next door," Sonnenberg writes, and Henry Fonda, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Claudette Colbert and Lauren Bacall float fleetingly through this memoir.

Susanna's parents separate early, and at first there seems to be plenty of family money. In Monte Carlo her maternal grandmother fretfully complains to Daphne about the children, "Won't they even try a taste of caviar?" But after another fight over money, and not getting enough of it from her ex-husband, Daphne, who by now has been a cabdriver and raped, turns up at Susanna's school just as she's learning to read, picks up little Penelope from preschool, then announces brightly that she's been diagnosed with leukemia, and that the three of them are going to drive from the East Coast to see the Grand Canyon, and not to worry -- she's just shoplifted sleeping bags and heavy winter coats for them from Bloomingdale's.

And of course there is no leukemia. There's just an ever-crazier mother with a hole in her septum from snorting too much coke, a woman who has seizures and gets committed and reports rapes and cancer as routinely as we might mention a string of parking tickets. Susanna goes off to prep school and conducts a year-long affair with an odious professor who has sex with her on his living room rug and tells his wife all about it. Susanna does everything in her power to encourage this state of affairs because she's in the grip of an ever more powerful crush. Meanwhile, her mother blabs on and on to her about who's good in bed, and when Susanna is a freshman at college her mother ruins Parents' Day by whisking her roommate off to Planned Parenthood to get her fitted for a diaphragm and then telling the roommate's parents about the jaunt; the roommate stops speaking to Susanna and then moves out.

After graduation and a couple of disastrous affairs, the author follows sturdily in her mother's footsteps: "I went to bed with everybody. I wanted the sex. . . . I said yes and yes and expected to go to bed on the first date. Otherwise I lost interest. . . . Sometimes I didn't make it to the first date." All this because her crazy mother is trying to steal her boyfriends, her life and all the attention. Meanwhile Penelope has grown up to be a sophisticated beauty who has taken to making cutting remarks and stealing a boyfriend or two herself.

Sonnenberg seems to have a highly developed hierarchy of sin. Lying is worst. Drugs come in a close second. Sexual stealing comes in third, and the possession of material wealth follows soon after. She eventually finds an honest man, moves to Missoula, takes those minimum-wage jobs, has those two sons and suffers greatly from the physical privations involved in manual labor, pregnancy and housework. Then comes the phone call saying that her mother is dying. Sonnenberg doesn't go to the bedside. Her sister stops speaking to her (and gets stuck with all the onerous hospital care). But, says Sonnenberg, "I had made an impossible decision, which unearthed the true calamity of being daughter to this mother." In other words, her mother made her do it. And, yes, her mother had no more sense of propriety and boundaries than a rhesus monkey. But Sonnenberg has gone on to write this semi-pornographic, sizzling but pious memoir for her sons to read. And even though she's changed their names, they'll probably recognize the material.