Beauvoir's autobiography (concentrated mostly on her early life) gives one an unblinking, honest look at "high" French society in the early 1900's: its extreme modesty (one can almost say "prudishness"), the male-female disparities (most women were expected, indeed pressured, to marry after reaching a certain level of formal schooling), the strict Catholic censorship of drinking and sex, and, of course, the high-nosed academia that was, proudly, Simone de Beauvoir's whole life.

The memoirs would read even drier than they do if not for the story of Zaza, and of Zaza and Simone's friendship, threaded all the way through. The fact that the book ends with Zaza's death, tragic as it is, really does 'make' the book, in my opinion. Beauvoir had ambitions of writing *the book* that would "say it all", but her memoirs try so hard to accomplish the feat that she actually ends up saying TOO MUCH. It took a good 200 pages of pure, boring Autobiography before anything appealed to my emotions: Zaza's correspondence and heart-wrenching love affair. These build up to the perfect climax--Zaza's untimely death--and make the last 50 pages worth the whole book. It's unfortunate that, in sending this message, Beauvoir may have lost a good portion of her audience before even getting around to it.

I personally find this book well worth reading, though--not just the last 50 pages--because I identify so well with Simone that it's uncanny. I started "Memoirs" when I was 17 but got rid of it when I got to the part where Simone lost her faith. 4 years later *I* stopped believing in God, too, and it's taken me this long to hunt down the book, and finish it. Makes me wonder how the rest of my life will play out, compared to hers... ( )

The childhood reminisces of a great woman. The book provides an interesting commentary on French culture in the time of de Beauvoir's youth. The details on her childhood glorification of her father and how that falters as she grows older is the most enduring part of the book. Sartre makes a cameo. ( )