Simone de Beauvoir

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.

She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent time in France politically.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

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“I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of black-currant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth. I was never attracted to paradises flowing with milk and honey, but I envied Hansel and Gretel their gingerbread house: if only the universe we inhabit were completely edible, I used to think, what power we would have over it!”

“Eating was not only an exploration and an act of conquest – an acquired taste in the real sense of the phrase – but also my most solemn duty.”

“Literature takes its revenge on reality by making it the slave of fiction.”

“Suddenly moved by the sight, I said to myself that it must be sweet to go through life with someone’s hand on one’s shoulder, a hand so well-known that one barely felt its weight, and so ever-present that loneliness would be banished for good.”

My gaze would wander from house to house, and I would tell myself, deeply affected by the balmy airs of the summer evening: ‘Soon I’ll be living my own life . . . really living.’

‘After all,’ he argued, ‘you don’t marry a young man simply because the colour of his tie suits him.’

My heart had died and the world was empty: could such an emptiness ever be filled? I was afraid. And then time started to flow again.

I had to repudiate all barriers and all artificial divisions between the classes, renounce my own class, and step outside myself. I could not imagine a service more beneficial to humanity than the dissemination of sweetness and light.

Why is it only in moments of regret, expectation, and pity that I feel my greatest surges of tenderness?

‘I dread happiness more and more,’ and ‘The prospect of saying yes or no to happiness causes me equal distress.’ Again: ‘It’s when I feel I love him most that I hate all the more the love I have for him.’

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter quotes

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