Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (2001)

This autobiography offers an intimate portrait of Simone de Beauvoirs childhood in a bourgeois French family, her adolescent rebellion against the conventional expectations of her social class and her decision to pursue an independent life marked by an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s. She describes her early life, from her birth in Paris in 1908 to her student days at the Sorbonne, where she met Jean-Paul Sartre, the dream-companion I had longed for since I was fifteen.