Finally, I just FORCED myself to read it. I had read her other book, The Second Sex. I wish I had read this before. It is her life story.
She had a 50 year relationship with Sartre. She doesn't even get to know him until the last 20 pages of the book! Here are her first thoughts and final thoughts on Sartre in the book:
Page 309 · Only Sartre’s little band , which included Nizan and Herbaud , remained closed to me ;
Page 310 · Sartre wasn’t bad to look at , but it was rumoured that he was the worst of the lot , and he was even accused of drinking .
Page 345 - Sartre corresponded exactly to the dream - companion I had longed for since I was fifteen : he was the double in whom I found all my burning aspiration raised to the pitch of incandescence . I should always be able to share everything with him . When I left him at the beginning of August , I knew that he would never go out of my life again.
More quotes are below:
Page 103 · Location 2146
I didn’t know a single grown - up who appeared to enjoy life on earth very much :
Page 104 · Location 2158
often declared , ‘ you have no dowries ; you’ll have to work for a living . ’
Page 107 · Location 2207
As long as he approved of me , I could be sure of myself .
Book Three
Page 260 · Location 4946
His tranquillity offended me .
Page 275 · Location 5220
out what was underneath that rebarbative
Book Four
Page 307 · Location 5805
‘ There is within me I know not what yearning – maybe a monstrous lust – ever - present , for noise , fighting , savage violence , and above all for the gutter . .
Page 307 · Location 5810
I feel an avid curiosity ; I desperately want to burn myself away , more brightly than any other person , and no matter with what kind of a flame . ’
Page 308 · Location 5817
never for a moment did I contemplate sexual indulgence .
She was a smart, unhappy person who discarded God in her youth. She was quite the intellectual, and she influenced the modern feminist movement.
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
Here is why James Mustich thinks it should be one of the 1000 Books You Read Before You Die:
“The ability to pass over in silence events which I felt so keenly is one of the things which strike me most when I remember my childhood,” writes Beauvoir early in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; the length and density of her four volumes of autobiography make it clear that this youthful ability is one she would later abandon with a vengeance. Her affections and friendships, uncertainties and confidences, infatuations and intense attachments to ideas as well as people—including her nascent relationship with her brilliant fellow student Sartre—are lushly remembered and related with a decidedly literary complexion. Just as her most famous novel, The Mandarins, a roman à clef of her and Sartre’s postwar circle, is fiction laced with reality, so her autobiography is fact that leverages the ways and means of fiction, a deliberate construction that allows her—with true existentialist agency—to create a portrait of the person she has chosen to be.
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