The first volume of de Beauvoir's memoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, is both distressing and fascinating. An account of her childhood to early adulthood: from her Catholic upbringing to her abandonment of religious sentiments and confinements ad nauseam in exchange of at times depressing, second-guessing journey to the eye-opening comforts of Philosophy.

Brought up in a bourgeois family restricted both by religion and expected gender roles, de Beauvoir was perceptive and insightful, her questions challenging in nature. As a child, she pondered about her easy acceptance of the truth after finding out Santa Claus was not real and their Christmas presents came from their parents, 'is this because we still get what we wanted that even if it's a deception it matters not?' and a budding scepticism towards adults' intent whenever they express concern and kindness, 'are they doing this to make me obey them?'. Towards her adolescence, amidst her parents' literary censorship and avoidance on conversations about sex (babies came from the anus, her mother stated), she acquired her own set of beliefs and discarded those which were stifling to her until she had to prove herself from her parents' disappointments regarding her choices (especially her choice to teach and refusal to adopt the common female role of that era).

Her literary undertakings greatly contributed on her growth both as an author and a thinker, ** "Literature took the place in my life that had once been occupied by religion: it absorbed me entirely, and transfigured my life." (p204) Nobody managed to stop her. They called her thirst for knowledge corruption, her influence evil. Her rebellious attitude often coincided with her ambivalent feelings towards marriage and family. It's a tug-of-war between her intellectual and spiritual lives, ** "The consequence was that I grew accustomed to the idea that my intellectual life — embodied by my father — and my spiritual life — expressed by my mother — were two heterogeneous fields of experience which had nothing in common." (p41). By her early 20s, though struggling, she had made peace with her inner desire, opting for the rewarding and difficult intellectual path in spite of her relatable, terrible longing for a romantic relationship. She was obviously head over heels with her cousin Jacques which she eventually learnt to move on from. However, a series of disillusionment can still be sensed with her string of platonic and ambiguous friendships which lasted years. She mused that it was easy for men to form a platonic friendship with her because she had a "female appearance and a male brain". Curiously, she didn't scare men off. However, most often than not, she saw herself as alien, different, never fitting anywhere. This was until she met Sartre and found in him her intellectual and romantic match; Sartre supported and took her under his wing, his respect and support for her choices was a breathe of fresh air; an enlightenment in itself. He did not put her inside The Gender Box: that women ought to marry and make herself a wife, nothing else. de Beauvoir's admiration for Sartre transcended the pages of this book and it was such a delight to read. I personally wanted more. Amusingly, it took 300 pages before she finally mentioned Sartre and his failure on a written exam.

What was deeply moving in de Beauvoir's memoir was how the people in her life, as she developed as a person, also developed for better or for worse. Vividly, we read and, to an extent, relate to the sudden estrangements, changes, and pleasant closeness she had with people beloved to her. It took years, at times it took only words. It depicted the loss of innocence and the fears of adulthood. Her longing for solitude both anguished and comforted her. She was a contradictory we all could find ourselves in.

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter was surprisingly painful by the end. A reflection of how remorse and guilt impact the conscience more so when they're without logic. It reminded me of what Winterson said regarding religious upbringing that one cannot completely eradicate it from one's inner self. However tiny, there'll always be a remnant of it left. We only have to try our best to silence it to a mere whisper of nonsense. This was a spectacular memoir. It's something that will certainly stay with me for a while. I honestly can't wait to get my hands on the second volume then surround myself with her fiction and hardcore philosophical works. ( )

Mit unbedingter Aufrichtigkeit erzählt hier eine der "klügsten Frauen des Jahrhundert" die Geschichte ihrer Jugend bis zu Begegnung mit Jean-Paul Sartre. Dies ist zugleich die Geschichte ihrer Befreiung aus dem Bann der konventionellen Denk- und Lebensformen des Elternhauses und damit ihrer Befreiung zu sich selbst.

This memoir precedes Simone de Beauvoir's troubled teaching years, covering her childhood and her own adolescence. I understand she becomes more self-conscious about who she may offend as well as less objective in the subsequent volumes. Under those circumstances, it would be hard to match or beat this impeccable first one.

Simone was of my grandmother's generation, born in Paris to a well-off upper-class bourgeois family with several extended members nearby. I was able to relate to her on a startlingly deep level, despite all of the circumstantial differences. She wrote about her inner thoughts and feelings, perceptions from her childhood and maturing years that I could intimately relate to. When she wrote about the self-discovery at five that she had an internal life that no one else was privy to, I remember that moment. I remember what she remembers, how it was as a child to view adults as all-knowing, almost another race of all-powerful beings whom I could not imagine questioning, and how that changes as one grows. How it appears as though one's future will (of course!) be glorious and come of its own accord, until the struggle becomes more apparent and the promise more remote, and the required work more obvious. The pleasures of finding one's own brand of certainty, and the pain of its mismatch with the distinguishably different certainties held by close family members; the conflicts and consequent repressions, the bitterness and loneliness. The false idols, and the unexpected happy discoveries.

I've read several books before that caused me to reminisce about my childhood, but rarely one like this that brought my teenage and early university memories so vividly back to life. In some respects she was more naive, but in others much wiser than myself. Her memoir is not merely a recording of memories. She is intensely interested in understanding and explaining from her adult, hindsight perspective, endowed with psychological insight, throwing me into my own self-analysis through compare-contrast. Achieving independence, a sense of self and identity, is a major theme and captured by the memoir's title. She relates in detail the stages she moved through in her perception of her parents: from viewing them as faultless to gradually becoming more resentful of the control and limitations their views imposed. Too driven by curiosity about the world to accept explanations like "because it isn't done" without questioning, still she needed to mature before she could openly challenge them. This portion of her story concludes with a statement that to choose a life for oneself can literally mean choosing to live.

Another major theme is her approach to romance, which could be read as cold and calculated if it wasn't so driven by romantic notions. I loved this feminist take (at age 15! in 1923!) about what sort of man she should wish to meet: "If in the absolute sense a man, who was a member of the privileged species and already had a flying start over me, did not count more than I did, I was forced to the conclusion that in a relative sense he counted less: in order to be able to acknowledge him as my equal, he would have to prove himself my superior in every way." In other words, a man must work twice as hard as a woman to impress her. Only Sartre could measure up to so high a standard, and it provides a kind of rising climax to this portion of her story as their orbiting worlds begin to overlap. I've a natural suspicion of any memoirist's self-portrait, but still I think I would have liked knowing Simone as a fellow student had our lives coincided. Her hard-headed steadiness and certainty in her principles and secular beliefs, a readiness to question everything; she would have been fantastic company. ( )

de Beauvoir says towards the end of the first part of her autobiography that she like to talk about her favourite subject - me. I should imagine that she enjoyed writing about herself and she spends many words here in doing just that. Memoirs of a dutiful daughter covers the first twenty years of her life and runs to 360 pages of close typed paragraphs. She is proud of her achievements and spends much time measuring herself against her competitors who are mainly fellow students in this first part of her story.

Simone de Beauvoir was born in 1908 into a comfortable upper middle class family and mixed in a society where many of her compatriots were born with "silver spoons in their mouths", however Simone was expected to be the dutiful daughter of the book's title. This did not sit at all with her ambitions, which from a fairly early age were to carve a career for herself as an intellectual. Her struggles to gain independence from her family while remaining on good terms were a balancing act that Simone managed to perform throughout her early life. It is this struggle that brought home to me the difficulties for a woman like Simone to realise her potential when most of society saw her role as a wife and mother. It was probably more difficult for Simone because of her family's place in the hierarchy, where arranged marriages were still the currency for families to thrive and prosper. As a woman Simone had to deal with family pressures as well as working hard to compete with her fellow students who were mostly men. Her successes in Education allowed her to study Philosophy at the Sorbonne and she was only the ninth woman to have received a degree. De Beauvoir does not need to highlight the inequality that she faced as a woman as this is self evident from her matter of fact presentation of the details of her early life.

It would not be much of an autobiography if the author did not reveal anything about herself and Simone certainly cannot be criticised on this score. She kept a detailed diary from her early student days and this must have helped her to enter into much self-analysis of this developmental period of her life. She tells us about her relationships with her family particularly with her devoutly catholic mother. She tells us about her admiration, her competitiveness, her inspiration and her intellectual development through many long hours of talking, discussion and questioning of her fellow students and teachers. She usually comes to the conclusion that she can and does outgrow them intellectually. Although she loses her catholic faith in her fifteenth year her strict moral upbringing, and her determination not to be sidetracked means that she like many women at that time represses her sexuality. At twenty years old she still seems naive in her dealings with the opposite sex and this results in anxiety that becomes acute at times as to how she should act/behave; for example with Jacques who she thinks she might marry and with whom she might be in love. She has a tendency to worship at the feet of men that she admires only to become disillusioned, when they do not come up to her expectations. Simone says towards the end of her book that:

'I placed people in two categories, the few for whom I felt a lively affection, and the common herd, for whom I had a disdainful indifference.'

If this sounds snobbish with an underlying lack of consideration for others then this is how Simone is happy to present herself at this time.

At the end of this first part of her biography Simone has crashed into the inner circle of intellectuals (all men) that surrounded Jean-Paul Sartre and he is starting to pay her special attention.

The book ends with the tragic death of her friend Zaza Mabille whose difficulties are similar to Simone's in that she is a clever woman, who struggles to become independent, in her case her failure to do so in Simone's opinion causes her early death. There is a genuine feeling of sorrow in Simon's relationship with Zaza in that she tried her best to help her much loved friend, but could not fight the social pressures under which Zaza eventually buckled.

This autobiography was first published as Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée in 1958 when Simone was fifty years old and there is very much a feeling of the wiser mature woman looking back and thinking deeply about herself as a younger woman. It proves to be a fascinating document not only of Simone's inner thoughts, but also of upper middle class society in France between the wars. The translation by James Kirkup flows well and I am looking forward to reading the next instalment. 4.5 stars.

I also enjoyed reading that many of the students in Simone's circle were blown away by Alain-Fournier's [Le Grand Meulnes] which I have just read. ( )

I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of blackcurrant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth.

Living in Indiana, mass transit remains a topic left of center. Sure we have a bus system but nothing further. Such is dreams of those elites who want to undermine something core, something both pure and competitive: something FREE. I have nerded on trains most of my adult life and look forward to every opportunity to indulge such. That was before I was to spend a week commuting at peak times back and forth from Long Island to Penn Station. Thus my spirit has been tempered. I can say with relish that this memoir was definitively transportive. I was impressed with her specificity, the reliable old journal always helps to sort things out. The dutiful of the title is ironic. Her true obligations weren't filial but to a more harrowing tradition.

This is some arrogant reading. My eyes did tend to roll. That said, the candor at times was certainly to be admired. ( )