Paper Trails: She Lived with Sontag, and Lived to Write About It

As a young woman making her way in literary New York, Sigrid Nunez — now the acclaimed author of novels like The Last of Her Kind — took a job as an assistant and Girl Friday to the famous intellectual Susan Sontag. Soon, Nunez was the lover of Sontag's son, David Rieff. And soon, the three of them were living together.

On the latest episode of Paper Trails, the public radio show about books, Sigrid Nunez discusses Sempre Susan, her chatty but never catty memoir of the year she spent in the House of Susan. Host Mark Oppenheimer and fellow panelist Binnie Klein talk New York in the 1970s, the place of the public intellectual in society, what we owe to the dead, and, above all, the legacy of Susan Sontag.