Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

What books should everyone read before they die?Add Book

Simone de Beauvoir

Biography & Memoir

Jul 27, 2018

“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.

Add Reply

DeAnn Rossetti

Oct 28, 2018

I read this one also in college, but I did it on my own because her works moved me and I felt that her life related to my own in a number of ways.

We use cookies on this website