distinguished & amoral woman
Simone de Beauvoir's Inseparable is 8.25 x 5.5 x 0.69 (!) inches & 176 pages (but really 128).
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Okay, I can’t tell if this going to be a boring way to start, but you know when you’re reading a book and you can feel you have like a nice little hunk of pages left, but then the book suddenly concludes, with like thirty pages of “notes” or something left, and you hadn’t done anything to prime for the importance of The End?
Simone de Beauvoir’s posthumous book, Inseparable, does end particularly abruptly (due to plot reasons, which I will not get into). But the last hunk—extraneous letters between Simone and her childhood friend—are this book’s very best pages.
The abandoned manuscript of Inseparable, written in 1954 and published in 2021, concerns de Beauvoir’s childhood friend Zaza, called Andrée in this novel. The final pages are selected letters sent actually between between Simone and Zaza, from 1920-1929. Where the novel feels urgent, rushed, and chilly, the letters are lush and languorous and full of heat. Here’s a sign-off:
Inseparable, maybe because of its undercooked quality, has a fibrous strength. In the novel, we meet Andrée as a nine-year-old who has survived a horrible fire where she was burned “to a crisp” and emerged impertinent and fearless and fiery. She’s a sparkler. She says stuff like:
The stand-in for Simone, Sylvie, loves Andrée completely and romantically and intensely (though not sexually, I’d argue; it’s cool to see a fervent romantic desire isolated from sexual desire).
Unfortunately, Andrée develops a crush on this guy:
Andrée’s young adulthood is the lived material for The Second Sex: relentless pressure to marry, to care for her family, to forgo all agency, to become a woman. She’s pulled apart, in several directions:
In order to get out of a party, Andrée does an Outrageous Act of Desperation//Act of Extraordinary Willpower that is so unbelievable of course, it really happened. Zaza’s letters to Simone verify this plot point, in an even more nonchalant fashion.
If you absolutely must know the details of this Outrageous Act of Desperation//Act of Extraordinary Willpower*, I hid it below a photo & a stupid internet fact for you to scroll to, now if you wish.
TRULY WILD, RIGHT? Glad you’re back!
Andrée is a wit, so the motivation behind what she says is often to amuse, but then I get the sense that’s also how she finds out what she really believes. When she does her Outrageous Act of Desperation//Act of Extraordinary Willpower, she explains it like this:
Andrée is someone who actually has a deep belief in fate. She’s also so excluded from agency in her world, that she sees herself as an exception to the sweeping, guiding force of fate. She knows it won’t intervene for her. To slice out the littlest opening for a life of her own, she doesn’t see a way other than to be a sliver, sly and sharp and dangerous as a blade.
PHOTO TO TAKE UP SPACE AND PROTECT YOUR EYES FROM WILD PLOT POINT IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW:
INTERNET FACT TO TAKE UP SPACE AND PROTECT YOUR EYES:
I once took a Myers-Briggs test and they had a list of the famous people with this type, including Simone de Beauvoir. They described her as “Jean-Paul Sartre’s girlfriend” and I was like UGHHhhhhHHH, but then I saw Jean-Paul Sartre listed for another personality type and he was described as “Simone de Beauvoir’s boyfriend” so I actually liked this whole arrangement, in the end.
**** REMEMBER THIS IS THE PART YOU SHOULDN’T READ IF YOU DON’T WANT TO KNOW THE OUTRAGEOUS ACT OF DESPERATION//ACT OF EXTRAORDINARY WILLPOWER **** :