A Very Easy Death: A Memoir [Paperback]

A Very Easy Deathhas long been considered one of Simone de Beauvoir’s masterpieces. The profoundly moving, day-by-day recounting of her mother’s death “shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence” (The Sunday Telegraph). Powerful, touching, and sometimes shocking, this is an end-of-life account that no reader is likely to forget.


Translated by Patrick O'Brian

“This book is written with restrained emotion and a literalness, a faithfulness to fact, that is very moving coming from a woman whom we have known as dedicated to abstractions. This is a difficult book to read as it must have been a difficult book to write . . . Unsparing in its depiction of a human being in her inevitable encounter with extinction, it illustrates the general tragedy of the human condition through a particularized instance. A book of near despair, yet dignified.”
—Library Journal

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIRwas born in Paris in 1908. In 1929 she became the youngest person ever to obtain theagrégationin philosophy at the Sorbonne, placing second on the exam to Jean-Paul Sartre. She taught at lycées in Marseille and Rousen from 1931 to 1937, and in Paris from 1938 to 1943. After World War II, she emerged as one of the leaders of the existentialist movement, working with Sartre onLes Temps Modernes.The author of many acclaimed works, de Beauvoir was one of the most influential thinkers of her generation. She died in 1986.

At four o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, 14 October 1963, I was in Rome, in my room at the Hotel Minerva; I was to fly home the next day and I was putting papers away when the telephone rang. It was Bost calling me from Paris: ‘Your mother has had an accident,’ he said. I thought: she has been knocked down by a car; she was climbing laboriously from the roadway to the pavement, leaning on her stick, and l3œ