Regarding Susan Sontag (Nancy Kates, 2014)

self-fashioning, self-consciousness

"She fills her journals with flinty thoughts: essays still to write; passionate, defiant, intellectually decadent, and often incomprehensible quotations; lists of obscure books to read and art-house films to see; words she’d like to use; records of café sittings; manifestations of culture beyond the beyond." 

“'I’ve never fancied the ideology of writing as therapy or self-expression,' she said. Sontag admired John Updike’s 'Self-Consciousness', and though she was particularly self-conscious in monitoring the face she showed, there is a distinct lack of directness in her telling, a denial of the cathartic impulse to shed layers or lighten her own load". 

Susan Sontag, here.