[...] “I was a madly gay little girl,” she writes, though what I noticed most in her description of her childhood wasn’t her happiness but her confidence. She had appalling handwriting (Sartre used to complain about it) and always “made a mess of hems,” but “as soon as I was able to think for myself, I found myself possessed of infinite power . . . when I was asleep, the earth disappeared; it had need of me in order to be seen, discovered and understood.” Her confidence, which never left her (“I have almost always felt happy and well adjusted,” she said at sixty-four, “and I have trusted in my star”), is astonishing. I have never known a woman, in person or in print, who talks about herself the way Simone de Beauvoir does. That preternatural conviction makes sense of the teenage Simone rejecting God and the social code of the bourgeoisie she was born into; the woman in her twenties believing that she was her lover’s essential love despite evidence to the contrary; the thirty-something deciding to write a book about the female condition; the fifty-year-old producing a 2,000-page autobiography. One day, while drying the dishes her mother was washing, she caught sight of the wives in the windows opposite doing the same thing, and had a vision of domestic life as a horrifying mise en abyme. “There had been people who had done things,” she said to herself. “I, too, would do things.” [...]