Welcome to Litsy!

I finally got the book you sent me Barbara! @BarbaraBB
I‘m sorry we were anxious about it, turns out the new owner had taken our mails for safekeeping.
I love coming-of-age stories, and this is said to be autobiographical, “deemed too intimate to publish” during her lifetime..I‘m very interested to read it. Thank you very much! ❤️

I enjoyed the sense of Paris in the 1920s, lucid writing (& translation) and depiction of female friendship. It gives a great insight into the expectations of society for girls and women of the time. Knowing it‘s inspired real events, it gives a sense of de Beauvoir‘s formative years. It didn‘t move me greatly but a strong novella with the texture of its time & place.

3 out of 5

‘I suddenly understood, in a joyful stupor, that the empty feeling in my heart, the mournful quality of my days, had but one cause: Andrée‘s absence. Life without her would be death.‘

I adored this book. It‘s bitesized, and like My Brilliant Friend, dissects the joys, complexities, and horrors of female friendships and adolescence. The tragic ending is inevitable, but it doesn‘t feel forced. Instead, it‘s an elegy to innocence lost too soon. Andrée, based upon de Beauvoir‘s childhood friend, is memorialised exactly as Sylvie hopes: she is made the hero of her story.

Such a perfect novel that I read it in one sitting, in under two hours, in the middle of the night. I‘m not normally this breathless in my praise of books but this undiscovered de Beauvoir novel made me hold my breath and feel actual pain in my chest reading in a way I haven‘t since I was a teenager. This barely fictionalised story of the life of a friend she was inseparable from and what Simone/Sylvia watched happen to her was just incredible