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"  In September 2006, two years after Susan Sontag&amp;#039;s death at 71 from blood cancer, The New York Times Magazine published excerpts from her notebooks: unfettered jottings on books, dates, people\u2014but mostly her sense of self\u2014by the writer and public intellectual with the iconic white hair streak. The rippling thrill that this unearthed material had on a certain pop culture-addicted, humanities-majoring, I-will-read-Hegel-someday demographic was as great as if one verifiable fact about TomKat or Brangelina had been unveiled\u2014maybe even greater. The link sailed through the Monday-morning e-mail channels: Did you see? Did you read? What did you think? We wanted more. The more, at least the beginning of the more, is here.  Reborn: Journals &amp;amp;amp; Notebooks, 1947\u20131963 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) is, as Sontag&amp;#039;s son, the foreign affairs journalist David Rieff, explains in his preface, the first of three volumes to be culled from her walk-in closet&amp;#039;s notebook stash. (No wonder she never mentions clothes\u2014where would she have put them?) Rieff&amp;#039;s rage at feeling forced to publish these highly personal documents, because his mother sold her papers to UCLA without instructions, simmers beneath the surface of his comments. But why bother worrying whether it was right to bring these to light? The fruits of Rieff&amp;#039;s editing labors are a gift, a page-turning joy\u2014it couldn&amp;#039;t have been easy for him to stumble on passages such as &amp;quot;P. [Philip Rieff, his father] and I used to talk often about using double contraception + starting to have sex again.&amp;quot; The first installment reads like the best books should: There&amp;#039;s a compelling plot\u2014we watch aghast as, at 16 and on the verge of a lesbian awakening, Sontag falls without explanation into a stifling marriage to Rieff, a sociologist whose class she audited; then we tremble as she wrestles herself out, damaged child and husband be damned, and discovers orgasms. Is she a bit of a coldhearted bitch? Yes, but aren&amp;#039;t we all when it&amp;#039;s a matter of survival? She&amp;#039;s also funny. Her compulsive literature and cinema lists are a highbrow High Fidelity, and her arch self-awareness will make you laugh aloud. &amp;quot;How easy it would be to convince myself of the plausibility of my parents&amp;#039; life!&amp;quot; she writes in 1948\u2014an absurdly precocious 15-year-old en route to UC Berkeley, but a teenager nonetheless. Or this, on a trip after a breakup: &amp;quot;Stunned + sleepy ever since I&amp;#039;m here.... The `real me,&amp;#039; the lifeless one....The slug. The one that sleeps and when awake is continually hungry. The one that doesn&amp;#039;t like to bathe or swim and can&amp;#039;t dance. The one that goes to the movies. That one that bites her nails. Call her Sue.&amp;quot; Even for those who never quite got to her seminal works\u2014&amp;quot;Notes on `Camp,&amp;#039; &amp;quot; say, or On Photography\u2014or her discordant, unexpectedly memorable fiction (The Volcano Lover), Sontag holds a particular fascination in this age of self-branding. She invented the ultimate freelancer&amp;#039;s role, a one-woman business in the culture industry, never stooping to suck up to a corporation or institution. These notebooks might lead detractors to accuse Sontag, yet again, of an unseemly will to power, a fixation on fashioning her persona; they&amp;#039;d do better to take her musings at face value. Anyone struggling with how to live without compromise or shame, how to produce art, to raise a child, to have good sex, will find validation in Sontag&amp;#039;s brilliantly articulated but recognizable impasses. &amp;quot;Work = being in the world,&amp;quot; Sontag writes, in a typical construction whose far-reaching implications belie its economy. Few worked at it harder, and how lucky for us to have a blueprint from a heroine who got it so right. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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