Reborn: Early Diaries, 1947-1964

In these carefully selected excerpts, Sontag details her developing thoughts, her voluminous reading and daily movie-going, her life as a teenage college student discovering her sexuality (“bisexuality as the expression of fullness of an individual”), and meeting and marrying her professor Philip Rieff, with whom, at the age of eighteen, she had David, her only child.

Most powerful are the entries corresponding to her years in England and Europe, when, apart from Philip and their son, the marriage broke down and Sontag entered intense lesbian relationships that would compel her to rethink her notions of sex, love (“physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly, important to me’) and daughter- and motherhood, and all before the age of thirty.