Parisian Lives
Remarkable
Cerebral
Thought provoking

Parisian Lives Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me--A Memoir

Deirdre Bair2019
National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written--or even read--a biography herself. The next seven years of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other--and lived essentially on the same street. While quite literally dodging one subject or the other, and sometimes hiding out in the backrooms of the great cafés of Paris, Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the domineering and difficult de Beauvoir required a radical change in approach, yielding another groundbreaking literary profile. Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details that were considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives is full of personality and warmth and give us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers.
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Reviews

Photo of Erin.
Erin.@colourhergone
3.5 stars
Jan 14, 2022
Easy read
Fascinating
Thought provoking
Photo of Monique Nguyen
Monique Nguyen@driescorn
4 stars
Feb 7, 2024
Photo of Nitin Khanna
Nitin Khanna@nitinkhanna
5 stars
Sep 25, 2023
Cerebral
Remarkable
Thought provoking
Photo of Stephen Schenkenberg
Stephen Schenkenberg@schenkenberg
3 stars
Dec 29, 2021