Swimming In The Sea Of Death: A Son's Memoir

Swimming in a Sea of Death is David Rieff's loving tribute to his mother, the writer Susan Sontag, and her final battle with cancer.

Rieff's brave, passionate, and unsparing witness of the last nine months of her life, from her initial diagnosis to her death, is both an intensely personal portrait of the relationship between a mother and a son, and a reflection on what it is like to try to help someone gravely ill in her fight to go on living and, when the time comes, to die with dignity.

In his most profound work, this brilliant writer confronts his feelings in relation to his mother – the guilt, the self-questioning, the sense of not having done enough. And he tries to understand what it means to desire so desperately, as his mother did to the end of her life, to try almost anything in order to go on living. Like Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, David Rieff's memoir is a beautifully written account of his mother's heroic struggle and the grief of those left behind.