Les Inséparables | Virtual Event

Professor and publisher Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir and author and New Yorker staff writer Judith Thurman discuss Les Inséparables, a novel by Simone de Beauvoir written in 1954 and released for the first time in fall 2020.

In her memoir Force of Circumstance, de Beauvoir mentioned that she gave the manuscript of Les Inséparables to Sartre who “held his nose.” Judging the story too intimate to be released in her lifetime, she kept it in her drawers, but saved it from destruction, putting it in the good care of her adopted daughter, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir.

Written in 1951, five years after the publication of The Second Sex, Les Inséparables tells the story of the “passionate and tragic” friendship de Beauvoir had as a young girl with Elisabeth Lacoin “Zaza”, who died at the age of 21.