Susan Sontag's "Pilgrimage" - Fact, Fiction, or Faction? (Part II)

Illustration by Aldo Jarillo, from Alex Ross's "What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann?"

A few years ago, I posted a note here asking if Susan Sontag’s “Pilgrimage” is fact, fiction, or faction. The question arose as a result of Erin Overbey including Sontag’s piece in her anthology of New Yorker personal essays called "Sunday Reading: Personal Reflections" (December 19, 2021). In my post, I noted that “Pilgrimage” originally appeared in The New Yorker as fiction, and that it’s also included in Sontag’s posthumous collection Debriefing: Collected Stories (2017). The editor of that book, Benjamin Taylor, in his Foreword, refers to the contents as short stories. He says, “Craving more uncertainty than the essay allowed for, Sontag turned from time to time to a form in which one need only persevere, making up one’s mind about nothing: the infinitely flexible, ever-amenable short story.”

Now there’s another opinion to be considered. Alex Ross, in his recent “What Went Wrong When Susan Sontag Met Thomas Mann?" (March 14, 2026) describes “Pilgrimage” as “semi-fictional.” According to Ross, Sontag’s meeting with Mann did take place, but not exactly the way she said it did in “Pilgrimage.” For one thing, at the actual meeting, there were two people accompanying Sontag, not one, as she says in the story. For another, the person she airbrushed from the piece, Gene Marum, was the person who cold-called Mann and requested the interview. It appears that Sontag’s “Pilgrimage" is that unreliable hybrid called faction.