all about my mother.(Her Last Deat: A Memoir)(Book review)

Byline: Megan O'grady

On Susanna Sonnenberg's sixteenth birthday, her mother presented her with two things: a silver Montblanc pen-"The finest pen ever made. It's for your writing"-and a gram of coke: "Your own gram. I cut it. It's fabulous."

Following in a long tradition of compulsively readable memoirs about glamorous, diabolical mothers-Mommie Dearest, Haywire-comes Her Last Death (Scribner), Sonnenberg's account of growing up in a New York apartment with a woman as manipulative as she was beautiful. (Her parents separated when she was three, and her remote, intellectual father, Grand Street founder Ben Sonnenberg, is but a peripheral figure in the book.) "When we went out together, my mother made us the stars and champions. She tossed off rapid, irreverent remarks, urged indulgence out of the most recalcitrant of salesgirls, seduced the most unhaveable of men. . . . To walk into a deli with her and order a sandwich was a particular commitment, a willingness to let her own the day."

Raised on the Upper East Side in the seventies and eighties with her younger sister, the author describes a world in which sex and celebrity-her mother went out with everyone from a Giants quarterback to Clint Eastwood-were bankable currencies. One of her mother's favorite anecdotes involved a famous writer, a neighbor, saying, "Susy's got a great ass. It's going to get her in trouble one day." Perhaps inevitably, Sonnenberg herself became a fledgling femme fatale, losing her ...