Runaround Sue

I. The Life

She was the Girl from the Golden West, born on Long Island but coming to awareness first among the red rocks and tumbleweeds of Tucson, then in Sherman Oaks, where she played World’s Smartest Valley Girl at North Hollywood High. There was always something different about Susan Sontag, some mysterious inner drive that was nowhere to be found in her glamorous, alcoholic mother, in her long-dead father (a fur trader in China), or anywhere else in the family tree. From an early age she worked at becoming an intellectual the way Tom Brady worked at throwing spirals, ripping through Les Misérables at age nine, laying out her disagreements with Schopenhauer at fourteen, hiding copies of Critique of Pure Reason behind the Reader’s Digests she was made to sit with in class (this actually happened, at least according to her).