Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics)

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E uno sguardo su un ambiente dove paletti e confini sono solide barriere che durante l’infanzia danno sicurezza ma crescendo ed acquistando coscienza sono pericolosi confini da abbattere. A non avere mai paura dei pensieri, a non sfuggire alle conseguenze del ragionamento, a onorare la priorità dell'intelletto. There comes a period in her teenage years when language, the necessity of interpreting language, becomes her enemy for just this reason: when we express our thoughts, feelings, and intentions, there is always a chasm between the thing itself—our interior landscape—and our expression of it; often this chasm is only widened when our words are interpreted by another person. Young girls suffering from thwarted and impossible loves, boys encouraged to get their hands on low-income young women before entering into marriage. The mood swings (which she attributes to her father and which remind me of childhood-me) are exhausting.

Viennent ensuite Le sang des autres (1945), Tous les hommes sont mortels (1946), Les Mandarins (prix Goncourt 1954), Les Belles Images (1966) et La Femme rompue (1968).Her education was a top priority, and Simone was always thinking ahead, deeply passionate for her Mama and Papa, they were her salvation, but the overly protected nature they showed had both good and bad points regarding her development.

This is an outstanding memoir written by a woman who came to know herself, stepped away from the crowd, and put feelings together in prose meant to enlighten all. I remember an awful feeling of dread, and of impotence: I didn't want to become this future self I foresaw, but presumably I could do nothing to stop it: "I"—the "me" looking at the polar bears—would be consumed in teenage-ness and no longer care about "my" (toddler-age) preferences. Una bambina eccezionalmente intelligente e precoce, ma allevata da genitori poco vigili, un giorno era andata a confidarsi con lui: aveva fatto così cattive letture che aveva perduto la fede e perso la vita in orrore; egli aveva cercato di riaccenderle la speranza, ma la bambina era contaminata in modo troppo grave: poco tempo dopo egli apprese che si era suicidata.

Here's Simone listening to her parents' friends (my translation): Ils lisaient et ils parlaient de leurs lectures. Il mio primo moto fu uno slancio d'invidiosa ammirazione per quella bambina, più grande di me solo di un anno, e che la sapeva tanto più lunga di me. I was born at four o'clock in the morning on the ninth of January 1908, in a room fitted with white-enameled furniture and overlooking the Boulevard Raspail. Her relationship with Sartre is only just beginning when "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter" concludes, but she knew he'd always be a part of her life because she felt like she had finally found an intellectual equal, who values her mind and her intelligence. It is also a time, in which I and many others have been looking back – even to just a year ago – and noticed how fundamentally different the present ‘self’ feels to who it used to be.

De Beauvoir's adolescence involves all the arrogance and angst one might expect from a recently-secularized teen who went on to become a preeminent existentialist (hint: a lot).

Goodness what a shock, Schama paints a picture of France on the eve of revolution in which you might struggle to find a priest who believes in God, where disrespect for the royal family is near universal, the ideas of Rousseau and the classical world as an ideal were on all minds, here de Beauvoir pere, while an atheist, is a royalist admittedly it is far easier to be a royalist once there are no actual kings or emperors and what not to deal with, the parents censor de Beauvoir's correspondence until she was almost twenty, her loss of faith is a profound blow to de Beauvoir mere. In Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, de Beauvoir included travel stories, set pieces, metaphors, intimate portraits, philosophical musings, and desultory political comments as she described her early years, when she tried to “get other people interested in her soul. Let's say it right away: every morning every week, I had to put this book in my bag because the train was entering the station. I had been sitting there for a few minutes when it hit me that I was drinking espresso whilst reading Simone de Beauvoir (in French! I place this above 'Speak, Memory' on my list of favorite memoirs, and there isn't any higher praise I offer then that!

Alors cette relecture-ci c'est mon plus grand argument en faveur de toutes les relectures du monde, parce que cette fois-ci j'ai trouvé tellement, tellement de choses dans ce récit autobiographique. I felt I was only missing a beret and a cigarette, and the picture would have been perfect (note to self: carry emergency beret and cigarette in purse, to maximize future poser moments). I love how books meant just so much to her, and all those descriptions of her spending day after day of her youth reading outdoors in some lovely garden just demands the reader should enjoy this book in the same way.One of the many threads running through the book traces de Beauvoir's evolving understanding of signs: where they come from, how they work, and the inescapable gap (despite her early naïvete) between the thing itself and the sign humans have invented to indicate it. It's been a long time since I connected with a book at such a level of visceral sympathy—since I had the feeling "Yes!