The Guardian Reviews Deirdre Bair's Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir

Literary biographer Deirdre Bair has penned what she calls a "bio-memoir," Parisian Lives (Nan A. Talese, 2019), which tracks the 15 years spent writing biographies of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir in Paris. "At a time when text-based French critical theory reigned supreme in American universities, Bair was determined to demonstrate that biographical approaches to literature were equally valid," says Kathryn Hughes of Bair's early work. More from her review at The Guardian:

[Bair] explains that by the time she had recovered from the misogyny of her Beckett years, she had developed not only a thick skin but a dawning feminist consciousness. Who better, then, as a subject for her next biography than Simone de Beauvoir, author of the seminal The Second Sex and, rumour had it, currently casting around for someone to write her life? Their first meeting at De Beauvoir’s Montparnasse apartment did not go well. Aged 73, she was no longer a soignée café philosophe. Instead here was a “lumpy, grumpy, frumpy and dumpy” woman in a grubby red dressing gown, whose face was inclined to go puce whenever she was angry, which was often. Worst of all, they had to communicate in Franglais, a language not known for its nuance. “Deirdre” was quite beyond De Beauvoir, who instead substituted a guttural “Darred”. Other things, though, appeared more promising. Far from forbidding notetaking, De Beauvoir made a fetish of it, insisting that Bair make both written and taped records of their conversations. All went well until it became clear that what drove De Beauvoir was not a passion for accuracy so much as the assumption that “Darred’s” job was merely to tidy up the punctuation and deliver her message, unedited, to posterity.

Read more at The Guardian.