The 1978 Rolling Stone interview of Susan Sontag by Jonathan Cott has just been published in unexpurgated book form. Her short-story collection, I, Etcetera, was released the same year that the Q&A was conducted, and sometimes for no reason I find myself thinking about the selection “Baby,” wondering how much of who we are comes from the time we’re born into. How much can we resist? 

From Mark O’Connell’s Slate piece about the RS book:

“Intense seriousness, of course, always has a tendency to verge on the comic. Sontag was the Platonic ideal of the intellectual, and so she could also come across as a not-too-subtle parody of the very idea of such a person. At one point, she tells Cott that the first book that really thrilled her was a biography of Marie Curie by Curie’s daughter Eve, which she recalls reading at age 6. The interviewer is impressed that a child of that age would go in for material of such relative heft. ‘I started reading when I was 3,’ she expands, ‘and the first novel that affected me was Les Misérables—I cried and sobbed and wailed. When you’re a reading child, you just read the books that are around the house. When I was about 13, it was Mann and Joyce and Eliot and Kafka and Gide—mostly Europeans. I didn’t discover American literature until much later.’ What to do with such a claim but both laugh at it and marvel at it? I thought of how my mother likes to remind me of my own alleged precocity by mentioning how she once came across me, age about 5, peering into a Jeffrey Archer blockbuster as though it contained the secret of life. By that age, Sontag would have been rolling up her sleeves and getting into Cervantes.