Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics)

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Quand j'étais petite je relisais toujours les mêmes livres, je me tannais pas; drôle que ça m'arrive tellement peu maintenant. And de Beauvoir does not neglect to notice that men and boys were not considered so delicate as to kill themselves over premature exposure to a tawdry potboiler. 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. Of course had life panned out as her parents wished it she would have emerged from the shell of childhood in the parental house to the shell of marriage in the husbands, as it was history intervened, slowly, but with decisive effect and we see her building a different kind of life for herself even if she is still at that point in her life herself looking for some grand unifying structure. la relecture, je me disais, quelle chance malgré tout de ne pas pouvoir faire autrement qu'être soi-même.

I can't say that I am quite certain what de Beauvoir's narrative is, towards the middle of her book I felt it was the loss of Eden. Although I want to discuss so much more—young Simone's feeling of tragedy at the unconsciousness of inanimate objects; her attribution of her own negative capability to the difference in her parents' belief systems; her relationships with her sister and her best friend; her first meetings with Sartre—I'm already running long. It is near impossible to simply add to the way I fill my time without changing the way in which I spend my days first. Beauvoir is intermittently in love with her cousin whom she views as a hero, especially in her younger years.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. 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.

God had given me the promise of eternity; I could not ever cease to see, to hear, to talk to myself.

At the age of five or six Beauvoir has vivid memories and intense feelings of love and devotion towards the people who are closest to her: her parents, her younger sister and her nanny, Louise. The mood swings (which she attributes to her father and which remind me of childhood-me) are exhausting.

While one of de Beauvoir's friends comes of a family were all the daughters either marry men or Christ. 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. She is now best known for her metaphysical novels, including She Came to Stay and The Mandarins, and for her 1949 treatise The Second Sex, a detailed analysis of women's oppression and a foundational tract of contemporary feminism. Her father looms large in this history, as both the object of her childhood and adolescent idolatry, and as a conservative blow-hard who says things like "a wife is what her husband makes her; it's up to him to shape her personality," and bitterly regrets the fact that his loss of money means that his daughters will be earning their own livings, rather than marrying well into good society (never mind that they PREFER to earn their own livings; that's not the point).The Rights of Man are along with pesky Bolshevik revolutions (destroying the value of de Beauvoir pere's investment in Russian debt) the threats to a careful, cloying, controlled, catholic culture. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain the agrégation in philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second to Jean-Paul Sartre. Mi ha aiutato a leggere in chiave intellettuale quel che mi succedeva, ad accettare l'originalità della mia persona (inserita in un universo di originali, cioè unici). It suggests that reconnecting with the mind of our childhood self might help to acquaint the child within with the stranger we have since become. One of these ways is " partial blindness " , which I think is a somewhat common phenomenon for women who grow up in close contact with a culture created almost exclusively by men.