“If a fraternity can be created by words, then writing is well worthwhile. What I wanted was to penetrate so deeply into other people’s lives that when they heard my voice they would get the impression they were talking to themselves.” -Simone de Beauvoir in The Prime of Life
The Prime of Life—published in 1960 as the second volume of four in Simone de Beauvoir’s autobiography— meticulously recounts the decade and a half of the author’s life when she began to emerge as a public figure. As the book begins, de Beauvoir has recently graduated from the Sorbonne and begun teaching high-school girls. She revels in the freedom her new financial independence brings. She and a young Jean-Paul Sartre have recognized a powerful romantic and intellectual partnership in one another; they begin to set its unconventional parameters. This is France between the two World Wars, and the openness with which these two conduct themselves is unheard of at the time. They live in complete devotion to one another, but refuse to marry; they take other lovers, even, and then compare notes. In an early scene, Simone’s father comes upon the two having a picnic in a field, and he awkwardly demands that Sartre declare his intentions towards his daughter. There’s no answer for that really, not yet. Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre will use their own lives to find one.
The author recalls her life in Paris in the formative years of 1929 to 1944, telling of her relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre and of Parisian intellectual life of the 1930s and 1940s
