'Extraordinary for all the reasons we would expect from Sontag's writing - extreme seriousness, stunning authority, intolerance towards mediocrity; Sontag's vulnerability throughout will also utterly surprise. At fifteen, when these journals began, Sontag already displayed her ferocious intellect and hunger for experience and culture, though what is remarkable here is watching Sontag grow into one of the century's leading minds.
In these carefully selected excerpts, Sontag details her developing thoughts, her voluminous reading and daily movie-going, her life as a teenage college student discovering her sexuality ('bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual'), and meeting and marrying her professor Philipp Rieff, with whom, at the age of eighteen, she had David, her only child. Most powerful are the entrie corresponding to her years in England and Europe, when, apart from Philip and their son, the marriage broke down and Sontag entered intense lesbian relationships that would compel her to rethink her notions of sex, love ('physical beauty is enourmously, almous morbidly, important to me') and daughter- and motherhood, and all before the age of thirty.
Watching Sontag become herself is nothing short of cathartic'.
Publishers Weekly