Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter

by Simone de Beauvoir

His insistence on this point convinced me that he was proud to have a brainy woman for a daughter; but the contrary was true: only the most extraordinary successes could have countered his dissatisfaction with me.

For months I kept myself going with books: they were the only reality within my reach.

This little fable expressed my most obsessive worry: how to defend myself against other people; for though my parents did not spare me their reproaches, they demanded my confidences. My mother had often told me how she had suffered from grandmama’s coldness towards her, and that she hoped she could be a friend to her daughters; but how could she have talked to me as one woman to another? In her eyes I was a soul in mortal peril; I had to be saved from damnation: I was an object, not a woman.

In principle, I had nothing against lying; but from a practical point of view I found it exhausting to be always fabricating masks.

Sometimes I used to think that my strength would fail me and that I would have to give in and become like all the others.

I was in exactly the same position as these unhinged young men from respectable homes; I, too, was breaking away from the class to which I belonged: where was I to go?

Once he told me very seriously: ‘D’you see, what I need is to have something to believe in!’ ‘Isn’t it enough just to live?’ I answered. I believed in life. He shook his head: ‘It’s not easy to live if you don’t believe in anything.’

The main reason for my desperate eagerness to save him was that apart from this love my life seemed desolately empty and futile.

I found death all the more frightful because I could see no point in living. And yet I loved life passionately. It needed very little to restore my confidence in it, and in myself: a letter from one of my pupils at Berck, the smile of a Belleville working girl, the confidence of a fellow-student at Neuilly, a look from Zaza, a thank-you, a kind word. As soon as I felt I was useful and loved, the horizon brightened and again I would begin to make fresh resolutions: ‘Be loved, be admired, be necessary; be somebody.’

I believed that I had freed myself from the bonds of my class: I didn’t want to be anyone else but myself.

I didn’t forget that all success cloaks a surrender,

‘I found in it a love, a cult of the dream which has no basis in reality and which perhaps put me well out of my course, far away from my real self.’

No, Zaza was neither half-hearted nor resigned to her fate: there was a hidden violence in her which frightened me.

it gave me a feeling of great satisfaction to know that I was so totally at odds with authority.

‘I want life, the whole of life. I feel an avid curiosity; I desperately want to burn myself away, more brightly than any other person, and no matter with what kind of a flame.’

for a long time I believed that I had paid for my own freedom with her death.