Simone

I found myself with a bit of a gap in the reading schedule (in between uni reading, work reading and travel reading), and, feeling in need of some emotional/philosophical fortification, I decided to revisit Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter. I was quite obsessed with Simone de Beauvoir in high school, after writing one of my last school assignments on her, but I haven't picked up any of her books since then. It is a pleasure and a relief that I still find her writing as fascinating and consoling as I did when I was seventeen. This book in particular stuns me - I have a terrible memory, so I find it astounding that Simone is able to recall incidents and emotional arcs from her childhood with such clarity. How could such a tiny person have such a sense of herself? Or such a sense of the fact that she lacked a sense of herself? Clearly only one of us had the makings of a genius!