[...] “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.” [...]

Andrée’s assumption in The Inseparables, that books were enough for Sylvie, has the force of a lover’s complaint. Andrée is the most important person in Sylvie’s life at that point and her opinion matters. Being poised must attract as many people as it puts off, but when I’m taken with someone, the idea that they’d prefer someone to laugh at their jokes rather than analyze everything haunts me, as it haunts Lenù, Sylvie, and Mary. Books do serve in an emotional crisis, and in curious ways: Lenù in particular can draw people to her with what she writes, can bury herself in books when her crush falls for someone else, can muddle a suitor’s intellectual status with love, can use her writing to make her passion last. Beauvoir would struggle wherever she loved, and writing could be a refuge for her, a routine, an escape but never quite enough on its own. In The Inseparables, Sylvie’s attention is occupied by Andrée’s romantic entanglements, while in life, Simone had Sartre waiting in the Jardin du Luxembourg to talk about Plato—and a career as a writer and thinker within reach.

As a body of work, hers feels accidental, prolix, and messy: not the work of a concrete block, but of a woman.

She died on April 14. At her funeral, of all the passages of all the books she’d written, Lanzmann chose to read the last paragraph of Force of Circumstance:

I loathe the thought of annihilating myself quite as much now as I ever did. I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing. They made no honey, those things, they can provide no one with any nourishment. At the most, if my books are still read, the reader will think: There wasn’t much she didn’t see! But that unique sum of things, the experience that I lived, with all its order and all its randomness—the Opera of Peking, the arena of Huelva, the candomblé in Bahia, the dunes of El-Oued, Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the things I’ve talked about, others I have left unspoken—there is no place where it will all live again.