Sontag

An image perverts the truth, she insisted, offering a fake intimacy. What, after all, do we know about Susan Sontag when we see the camp icon “Susan Sontag”?

She saw the difference between the person, on the one hand, and the person’s appearance, on the other: the self-as-image, as photograph, as metaphor.

But she was acidly disappointed by the price her double—“The Dark Lady of American Letters,” “The Sibyl of Manhattan”—exacted. She confessed that she’d hoped “being famous would be more fun,”9

At the end of her life, seeing a picture of her younger self, she gasped. “I was so good-looking!” she said. “And I had no idea.”

With the mind of a European philosopher and the looks of a musketeer, she combined qualities that had been combined in men. What was new was that they were combined in a woman—and

Susan Sontag was America’s last great literary star, a flashback to a time when writers could be, more than simply respected or well regarded, famous.

how pain could be portrayed, and how it could be endured.