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Parisian Lives by Deirdre Bair: book review



Parisian Lives – Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir (2019) is set in Paris over 15 years from 1970 to 1985. It is the backstory of the author’s first two biographies – Samuel Beckett: A Biography (1978) and Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography (1991). 

It was these two biographies that become Deirdre Bair’s best sellers. Bair tells how she landed access to the French authors, and her modus operandi for writing about the 1969 Nobel Prize winning Irish author Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) – best known for his 1953 novel Waiting for Godot, and the French feminist and existentialist novelist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) – best known for The Second Sex (1949) and The Coming of Age (1970). Both biographies took different styles and methods to adapt to two completely different people.  


Bair begins with the years 1970 to 1977 with Samuel Beckett whom she met with regularly in Paris, where he was living. She has just completed her doctorate and had never even read a biography when Beckett agreed for her to be his biographer. Simone de Beauvoir was so impressed with the Beckett biography that she agreed to Bair’s request to be her biographer too – but with a number of conditions. Bair spent time with Beauvoir from 1981 to 1986, taking nine years to write the biography before its release in 1991.  


Bair writes of the challenges and joys, the people who were helpful and those who were not, the changeable times, and the unreliable schedules. She writes of the hundreds of peripheral interviews and the fact-checking. She writes intimate details of their personalities and that Beckett and Beauvoir ‘cordially detested each other.’ 


She also writes her own memoir of those years, taken from her copious notes, and of her family and the academic community. And her attendance at the funeral of Simone de Beauvoir – just a week before my first visit to Paris. The news was still in the headlines of France’s newspapers. 


The memoir is honest, candid, funny, revealing, and poignant. This is a fabulously interesting memoir, and one that is difficult to put down.







 

 

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS  is an international aid and development consultant, and the author  of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce  (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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