People she interacted with claimed they hadn’t talked to her, while others who were obstructive claimed she could never have written the book without their help. Lewd rumours about what she must have done to get him to “open up” proliferated both during the writing process and for years post publication, along with repeated insinuations that she was one of those “American Women’s Libbers” in a “free marriage”.

If Beckett’s concurrence was quick (“I will neither help nor hinder you”), so was the flood of disparaging responses from people who claimed to be close to him, and even from established academics and scholars. She first met him in Paris in November 1971, and began the Beauvoir biography a decade later. Though she had long toyed with the idea of writing a book about how these biographies evolved, publishers were only interested in what Beckett and Beauvoir “were really like.” And so Parisian Lives became a “hybrid of memoir and biography”, and Bair an “artist under oath”: there could be “no hiding, and sometimes it was painful.”īair had been a journalist and written a dissertation on Beckett when she wrote seeking his consent. Beckett and Beauvoir were also the biographical subjects she grew most attached to, and her recently published memoir Parisian Lives Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Me: A Memoir tells us why this was so. At 84, Deirdre Bair has authored six biographies but the subjects who continued to arouse the most interest were the two she first wrote about: Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir.

Samuel Beckett by Deirdre Bair