This book was very sad to be honest. It was very short, but packed a big punch. The descriptions of her mother were so sad and grotesque. It was just an extended scene of her mother absolutely wasting away. It really hit me when she was talking about her mother giving up on living, and just becoming a corpse that is alive. This book made me really scared of getting old.
I also liked that this book was a way of reckoning with her conflicted feelings around her mother. Because there she is on her death bed, but also Beauvoir knows that her mother did not treat her well, which created some very conflicted feelings.
Overall this book was written beautifully, and dealt with some heavy topics in a nuanced way.
Read from the BYU library.

so utterly personal yet universal, it helped me feel understood in the pain of death's horror

A complete 180 from the current pattern of books I've been reading and a worthwhile beginning to a new year of reading. I will be honest, I started this because it is short and I thought I'd be able to finish it before the end of December in order to add another book to my 2022 stats. I continued reading even after 2022 passed because my interest was genuinely captured. Anyone that knows me knows I was hospitalized and near death for two months. That entire period of my life is filled with shame and pain, and to see the outside perspective of a loved one is so different. My mother sat at my bedside while I was dying and continued to support me in recovering from the worst of my chronic illness. Simone de Beauvoir's experience is similar, but also near opposite. She cares for her mother while also being helpless to prevent the inevitable end to her life. I need to do more reading like this to gain wider perspective, I guess this book helped me affirm my place in this world more.

(I took the easy road reading the translation when I should’ve read it in French to fend off forgetting my 6.5 years of language education…)

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