My friends and family will assist you and my enemies will find you soon enough.’ ” At that first meeting, “he made the remark that has since come to haunt me: ‘I will neither help nor hinder you. This memoir is the result.īair devotes the first two-thirds of the book to Beckett, whom she met in Paris in 1971 after completing her doctorate. She resisted writing a personal book for years, but when other biographers misrepresented information she had given them, she had to offer a corrective. “What were they really like?” readers often asked Bair. She spent years working on their biographies - Beckett’s in the 1970s, Beauvoir’s in the 1980s - when she was a young academic who, as she often mentions, struggled to balance family and her academic career.īoth biographies were well regarded, but audiences wanted more. They “cordially detested each other.” So says Deirdre Bair of Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir.
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