Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (Penguin Modern Classics)

Product Information

While Beauvoir is studying at the Sorbonne, living on her own, and meeting Sartre, her cousin and her best friend are swallowed up by their miserable lives. L’amore, l’amicizia con tutti i rimescolamenti del caso non sono il punto focale di queste pagine che va, piuttosto, rintracciato nelle connessioni con il pensiero intellettuale di una generazione che si affacciava allora sul primo dopoguerra schifata dall’oppressiva mentalità reazionaria.

Memoirs and autobiographies are interesting things - they give the author to shape and transform the raw stuff of their life into a narrative, not that will say anything untrue (hopefully) but there is always selection and emphasis going on, perhaps subconsciously - what we chose to remember and prefer to forget - as much as consciously. io mi rifiutavo, con la stessa ostinazione di quando avevo cinque anni, a prestarmi alle commedie degli adulti. Not only did he give me encouragement but he also intended to give me active help in achieving this ambition. Naturally in such constricted circumstances cousin marriage is frequent and Simone herself spends a fair chunk of the book fixated upon cousin Jacques who in time becomes fixated upon the bottle (not due to her, his trajectory seems powered by a different dynamic).One might see in this too the kinds of inter-war cultural developments for a national culture which unified social classes as a precursor to fascism or communism, indeed de Beauvoir pere approves of Mussolini from monarchy to Mussolini not such a jump I suppose.

Since this book covers mostly her childhood, adolescence and early adulthood, it focuses a lot on her family, her childhood friend Zaza, her love of books, her studies. 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). A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, 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. At some point before this realization, she thinks to herself that to lose one's faith would be the most horrible thing she can imagine happening to a person; yet when she herself realizes that it has happened to her, it makes no immediate change in her life; she feels little distress. She wrote novels, monographs on philosophy, political and social issues, essays, biographies, and an autobiography.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. Suddnely the future existed: it would change me into someone else who would say "me" and would no longer be me. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's pageview limit.

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.I am not so sure I can take this amount of details about the ups and downs of her relationship with Sartre. She oftentimes quotes the diary she keeps during these years which are filled with grand, melodramatic statements: “I want life, the whole of life.