Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

French Existentialist philosopher, novelist, essayist, and groundbreaking feminist Simone De Beauvoir was born in Paris, where she lived most of her life. She was the author of the feminist classic The Second Sex, several volumes of autobiography, and many acclaimed novels, including The Mandarins, winner of the Prix Goncourt .

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 political time.

“It is a book that will leave no one indifferent, and no one affected in quite the same way.”

— New York Times