Photo by Diane Arbus

Susan Sontag with her son David Rieff photographed by Diane Arbus in 1965.

Rieff writing about Sontag in his recent book Swimming in a Sea of Death:

“If I don’t believe in my own work,” she once said to me after one of her books had received a particularly disdainful review from a writer who made much of how seriously my mother took herself, “why should anyone else?”