Nearly half a century later, her latest book, Parisian Lives, tells the story of her writing Samuel Beckett: A Biography and its follow-up, a biography of Simone de Beauvoir.Īt Columbia in the late 1960s, she found herself a triple outsider: a woman in an overwhelmingly male space a woman committed to her family at the expense of the political ideals of the time and a somewhat old-fashioned reader who found the vogue poststructuralism of that era “convincing in the main but still unholy” and who was interested in uncovering something as déclassé as Beckett’s intentions. Even then, he didn’t make it easy, from the very beginning: Beckett unexpectedly left Paris for Tunisia just as Bair arrived, leaving her to navigate a labyrinth of delays and silences without any direction from him. Nevertheless, she was particularly qualified to write Beckett’s, having worked as a journalist for a decade, having just written a dissertation on his fiction, and-perhaps most importantly-having the courage or gall to write him a letter offering to do it. When she set out to write her award-winning biography of Samuel Beckett, Deirdre Bair had never even read a modern biography. Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir
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