A Very Easy Death

"This book should have had the title ‘a very gentle death’ because she loved the poem by Dylan Thomas ‘Do not go gentle into that good night.’ I’ve chosen this because it’s representative of Beauvoir’s life writing. People often refer to her having written four volumes of memoirs that were explicitly about her own life. This one (which could be counted a fifth) is about the death of her mother and it was published in 1964. I think it is a very moving memoir of the death of someone she loved and reflections on mortality. But it also shows some of the things that preoccupied her throughout her life in terms of, ‘What is the right balance of love?’ In a way, she thought that there are two vicious poles of love: egoism, which is totally self-centred, and devotion, which tyrannically makes the other person the object of love. No, the person who loves tyrannizes the person they claim to love by not respecting their freedom. A simpler way to put it might be to say that she thought that people often struggled with either excessive self-renunciation or excessive self-centeredness. This was a dynamic that she observed especially with her own mother, who adopted a lot of the Catholic ideals of self-sacrifice in the way that she lived her life. “She really underestimated herself. She’s remembered as this pioneering feminist, this trailblazer, but she never set out to be that person” This book shows Beauvoir as someone who is very human, who’s thinking about what it means to love. Her relationship with her mother wasn’t brilliant; she definitely rejected the life that her mother lived. This is her coming to terms, nevertheless, with the end of her mother’s life and the sacrifices she made in it. It’s more about her relationship and coming to terms with her mother’s death. Beauvoir and her sister decided not to tell their mother the entire truth about what was happening to her. They knew that her diagnosis was fatal and really it was watching her mother diminish before her eyes. It’s a reflection on that, but also on the dwindling of her hopes about their relationship. So it’s sad, but beautiful. My view did change quite a lot, because as I read her works chronologically—to try to get a picture of the way she developed and the way she became the person that she did in time—I could see how much she’d been underestimated by her century, and also that there were moments when she really underestimated herself. She’s remembered as this pioneering feminist, this trailblazer, but she never set out to be that person. She makes this distinction between who she was from within and who she was from without. One of the things that I find very fascinating about her life is how much she suffered because of the way people viewed her from without. In many respects, I would."