I started to read Simone de Beauvoir at perhaps 21, and has continued to read her and read about her until this present moment. Over the years my understanding of her thought and her life has radically changed, but I always recognise this early encounter with her in my formative years shaped the course of my life up to a good degree.

Her biography by Deirdre Bair is a brutally honest portrait of a woman who clearly heard the unmistakable sirens of the heart but always chose to align with the head’s preoccupations. As an adolescent, I was anxiously enchanted by what I then romanticised out of her life; as a maturing adult, I was weirdly consoled by what I now see as amounting to debunking of a myth – especially her mythical alliance with Sartre. That’s why this biography is brilliant – hers is a life of existential struggles everyone faces, but her response to life’s essential problems was direct, explicit, unapologetically self-centred and self-serving.

Beauvoir admitted to a kind of self-absorption which precluded any genuine sympathy or understanding of the needs of others, not only of a casual friend but of closer friends as well. People interested her then only insofar as they contributed to what she expected of herself or wanted from them. They all stayed within the boundaries of the space she had assigned them in her life, and so they never required any kind of emotional engagement from her other than what she directed and controlled.

She had everything and everyone slotted into neat little compartments, all seemingly willing to rest in suspended animation until she declared that it was time to take them out and start the movement of their lives as she wished them to be entwined with hers.

Her essential self was formed very early on due to an intensely disciplined childhood and adolescence, when she needed to “explained myself to myself.” Nothing really shook that core (her American lover Nelson Algren was only remotely close…but still on the peripherals). The irreplaceable status Satre had in her life was precisely because his solidified her core. There was the presence only of essentials. It was an uncluttered kind of life (despite surface chaos), a simplicity deliberately constructed so that they could experiment their beliefs via living.

In my younger years, I looked upon admiringly the Sartre-Beauvoir pact and how they elevated the contingency into a principle. Contingency worked for them, but only for them. Jealousy is an emotion Sartre genuinely lacked, while all through their relationship, Beauvoir had wisely, carefully insulated Sartre from having to choose between her and someone else, knowing instinctively that if he did, she might well be the loser. Other women had issued ultimata and they lost every time.

But we had become necessary to each other in a way that I don’t think people ever really understood…It’s true, we knew each other so well, no one ever understood us as we understood each other. But rather than to see us as senile old people, too lazy or too tired to change, they should have said that all our shared experiences made us supremely at ease and comfortable with each other.

What they shared was fundamental and irreducible. That responsibility one has for oneself – something that mustn’t be outsourced. Beauvoir on her teaching:”to teach them how to think, then how to think for themselves, and never what they should think.”

In a similar vein, Sartre on why he was writing about Flaubert. “Because he is the opposite of what I am. I need to rub against everything that puts me into question. In The Words I wrote, ‘I have often thought against myself.’ That sentence has never been understood…But in fact, that’s exactly how one should think: one should always be questioning one’s own assumptions.”

Nelson Algren had disturbed Beauvoir’s rigidly defined, self-controlled world when he showed her that passion and reason could indeed be present within a single man and offered her the opportunity to be part of the traditional male-female couple she had always scorned as an “impossible contrivance of fools who write romance.”

She also told him she was “mad with love and happiness,” but he should not come visit before when she would be finished with The Second Sex. How interesting that, in a relationship composed in equal parts of physical attraction and intellectual respect, she was restrained enough to place a higher priority on reason than on passion. Her reply is especially curious, since her letters are filled with effusive descriptions of her yearnings and dreams, all thinly veiled accounts of sexual longing…”nice girl…on the bad side of forty…with a number of flaws and bad habits, who hasn’t slept with a man in Paris for two years.”

Algren was like a dream come true for me, and I did not want anything to spoil it. Yes, all right: I too was like Sartre. I wanted to avoid confrontation, I wanted everything to be nice.” She told Algren that no one would ever love him more than she did, but added, “I cannot leave Sartre. I am his only true friend, and I owe him a great debt for all that he has done for me for more than twenty years. I would rather die than leave Sartre.

Alcohol was perhaps the other object that served to loose up Beauvoir’s structured life. In 1982, She described her drinking habits since 1950:

I like to drink very much. Since Sartre’s first illness, it has become for me an element of equilibrium. In general, I have, let’s see, one or two vodkas before lunch, and then in the afternoon I have two or three scotches during the day. I drink very little wine because I don’t like the taste anymore. But [vodka and scotch] in my opinion is necessary for me now…the drinking I do during the day and the evening – that, for me, is essential. I need that.

I paid extra attention to how she dealt with ageing, something I’ve started to think a lot about. She had been obsessed with the idea of death from the time she was a child. She thought of herself as old, or “too old” for one thing or another, for almost her entire life, from her sadness at being “too old” to sit on her mother’s lap to her idea of herself as “too old” for physical passion at the beginning of her affair with Algren, when she was in her late 30s. It was as if from her earliest rational moments in childhood she began to prepare herself for people and things to be taken away from her.

Her fear of old age really had several different aspects to it: she was the woman who witnessed the change in her own body with horrified fascination, powerless to stop the inexorable biological clock; hers was also the detached, observant eye of the writer and social critic who could understand and accept what was happening to her only by putting it into an impersonal context and then speaking of it personally. “Old age,” she mused, “but they are all young, these people who suddenly find that they are old. One day I said to myself: ‘I’m forty!’ By the time I recovered from the shock of that discovery I had reached fifty. The stupor that seized me then has not left me yet. I can’t get around to believing it.”

The sight of her own face upset her: “I loathe my appearance now: the eyebrows slipping down towards the eyes, the bags underneath, the excessive fullness of the cheeks, and that air of sadness around the mouth that wrinkles always bring.” She was 51 when she wrote this, and photos taken then show a woman whose physical appearance is the exact opposite. Here is an enviable youthfulness – in everyone’s eyes but her own. “Death is no longer a brutal event in the far distance,” she wrote at age 51. “It has already begun.” “…because I was an old woman. I would be alone from this moment for the rest of my life.”

To deal with memories of Sartre after his death (six years before hers) meant expressing emotion, which was always difficult if not impossible for Beauvoir unless she could find a way to control it at the same time. I always think this inability to give in to emotion is the main reason why her novels are much less readable than her autobiographies. Those fictions are almost monotonous and dull (compared to her real life).

What struck me hardest was how her relationship with Algren ended.

Algren never forgave Beauvoir, and his vitriol against her in his last days was as fresh as it had been when they parted 16 years previously:

She tried to make our relationship into a great international literary affair, naming me and quoting from some of my letters. She must have been awfully hard up for something to write about…Hell, love letters should be private. I’ve been in whorehouses all over the world and the woman there always closes the door…but this woman flung the door open and called in the public and the Press…

Beauvoir kept Algren’s letters in her apartment, on the sleeping loft near her bed (whereas she dumped Sartre’s manuscripts unceremoniously into her cellar storage area). When news of his last comments reached her, she waved a handful of them and said, “You have to make it clear that I lied in all those letters” written to him. Then she averted her eyes and muttered, “Everything was a lie,” before refusing to discuss it further, insisting that her memoirs contained the truth “of a not very important love affair.”

“Don’t you feel anything for him?” Her sister asked.”Why should I?” she replied. “What did he feel for me, that he could have written those horrible things?” However, she continued to wear his ring.

I was immensely saddened but weirdly consoled at the same time upon reading this.