By Susanna Sonnenberg. Scribner, 273 pp, $28, hardcover

If you’re contemplating writing your life story and wondering if you have enough juicy material or if you’ll have to go all James Frey on yourself, Susanna Sonnenberg’s mind-messingly seductive memoir will really pop your balloon. That is, unless you, too, had a mother who a) encouraged you to masturbate to Penthouse Letters when you were 10; b) taught you how to snort cocaine when you were 13; and c) had sex with famous actors and musicians, plus most of your high-school crushes and boyfriends. Nice try.

“She could connect at a stoplight,” Sonnenberg writes of her beautiful, promiscuous mother, “Daphne” (everybody but the author gets a pseudonym), in Her Last Death: A Memoir. The trouble with the moneyed, pedigreed Daphne seemed to be that she hadn’t gotten enough of being young and fabulous in swinging-’60s London when she found herself divorced in Manhattan with two kids by age 22. The trouble for Sonnenberg and her sister, Penelope, was a charismatic “calamity” of a mother who—like Peter Pan, but on drugs—wouldn’t grow up.

As Sonnenberg recounts with mesmerizing cool, Daphne whisked her daughters from Venice to Monte Carlo to Tangier to Barbados, tangling sheets with umpteen lovers and popping/snorting/injecting numerous pharmaceuticals. Norman Mailer, Bob Dylan, and Mick Jagger all have cameos in the intoxicating whirl.

But no one dazzled more than Daphne herself. No one else “asked me the questions my mother did”¦eager for my ”˜thoughts & feelings.’ No one else made me feel really interesting, different, magical.” This same mother warned preteen Susanna to “ ”˜Keep your hands off my man’ ”; explained “the dealers you could trust and those who were just cokeheads”; and, for her 16th birthday, gave her a tiny white packet—“Your own gram. I cut it. It’s fabulous.” Daphne also offered to snag a cute drummer to bag Susanna’s virginity, but, oops, bedded him herself.

The fallout? Teenage Susanna had a lengthy affair with a married teacher. Later, she had sex with “everybody”. Sonnenberg doesn’t psychoanalyze the mother who enraptured, enraged, and informed her, but needy Daphne compels our sympathy. And in the heady details of that years-long mother-and-daughters pyjama party, nostalgia—for Bellinis and rock stars, for Daphne’s smell of “tea rose, Band-Aids, honey and coffee”—is palpable.