It is a traditional autobiography in that it starts with her birth and moves in a linear way, with the occasional foreshadowing, to her chosen endpoint which is when she turned 21, finished her schooling and left home. This leads nicely into the first aspect of the book I’d like to discuss, its form. WARNING: THERE BE SPOILERS IN THIS SECTION – DOES THAT MATTER IN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY? But this particular autobiography ends at the moment when she formally leaves childhood behind, and, like a bildungsroman, is primarily the story of her “formation”. I’d describe it as the autobiographical equivalent of a bildungsroman, which sounds silly since autobiography is intrinsically about the development of self. It shows the inner conflict she experienced as an independent thinker growing up in a conservative Catholic bourgeois family. It deals at some depth with her childhood, school and university days her relationship with family and friends her youthful thoughts about and experience, such as it was, of love and, most importantly, the foundations of the ideas that drove her adult life. Published in 1958, the book chronicles her youth from her birth in 1908 to when she turned 21 in 1929. Consequently, my plan is to focus here on a few that interest me, and to later post a Delicious Descriptions containing examples of her gorgeous descriptive writing.įirst though, as always, a brief summary of its content. Now, the things is, it’s a pretty dense book that can be looked at from multiple angles, too many to explore in one review. Then this year, my reading group decided to choose one of the books being discussed in ABC Radio National’s European classics series – and we opted for the first of Beauvoir’s autobiographies, Memoirs of a dutiful daughter. I enjoyed it as I recollect, but that was a long time ago. It was, instead, one of her autobiographical novels, She came to stay. I have only read one other work by Simone de Beauvoir – and I’m ashamed to say that it wasn’t The second sex (which still sits in my long-in-the-tooth TBR pile).
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