Parisian Lives

Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir

By: Deirdre Bair

Narrated by: Suzanne Toren

Length: 13 hrs and 49 mins

Publisher's summary

A Pulitzer Prize Finalist

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her 15 remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art.

In 1971, Deirdre Bair was a journalist and a recently minted PhD who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could be his biographer despite her never having written a biography before. The next seven years of probing conversations, intercontinental research, singular encounters with Beckett's friends, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Bair to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir.

Where Beckett had been retiring and elusive, Beauvoir was domineering and all encompassing. Plus, there was a catch: Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other - and lived in the same neighborhood. Bair, who resorted to dodging one subject or the other by hiding out in the great cafés of Paris, learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the forceful and difficult Beauvoir required a radical change in approach and yielded another groundbreaking literary profile while also awakening Bair to an era of burgeoning feminist consciousness.

Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives gives us an entirely new perspective on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers. It is also a warmly personal reflection on the writing life - its compromises, its joys, and its rewards.

©2019 Deirdre Bair (P)2019 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

"Sparkling... Bair spent seven years on Beckett and ten on Beauvoir, and her dedication to her subjects is apparent. Into her accounts of working with these eminent, often exasperating writers she weaves recollections of malfunctioning tape recorders, grandstanding sources, and her travails as a professional and a mother commuting across the Atlantic, working in a field dominated by men." (The New Yorker)

"Gripping... In Parisian Lives, which reads much like a ‘making of...’ documentary, Bair gives us her off-camera take on her first two biographies. And, to our delight, we become voyeurs. Can this inexperienced young American tame these two monstres sacrés? Will she be hoodwinked by two larger-than-life writers who want to influence, manipulate, control, even censor her - even as, all the while, they appear to cooperate?... A story well told." (Alan Riding, The New York Times Book Review)

"This juicy book, which [Bair] dubs a ‘bio-memoir,’ is at once a record of triumph over the skepticism and sexism she encountered on her path from journalist to academic and biographer and a valuable lesson in the art of biography.... Parisian Lives is an unqualified success." (Heller McAlpin, The Wall Street Journal)

A beautiful & thrilling book!

I found this book charming, insightful, surprising, & wise! What a life! Filled with such fascinating encounters!

An American's Memoir Featuring Two Parisians

Is the more fitting title. This is much more about Bair's life, writing career, and adventures in academia than it is about Beckett and de Beavouir. I doubt we learn more about them then we would by reading their Wikipedia pages. It's written well enough and it breezes along, but read this only if you want to learn more about Bair than the other two.

A puzzle

I’ve enjoyed other books by the author, and other narrations by the voice actor, but somehow the combination of them here makes this text insufferable - self-pitying, arrogant, self-important, and difficult to enjoy . As noted, a puzzle with some fascinating content.

exquisite

This was a moving story of wills, egos, talents and circumstances which, as the story unfolded, beckoned the reader to follow. Initially, I had no idea the sort of book this is. A “bio-memoir,” I later find out, is a very curious term indeed. Had I known the book’s self-proclaimed identity at the start, I’m not sure I’d even understand what that meant.
Yet, it is exactly that, a memoir of biography, and as a new experience for me, I jumped in wholly after wading in at my knees being first uncertain of the book’s point.
Anyone who does not finish this book will never know how truly moving it is.
The narration is the best I’ve heard.
The entire experience, text and narration are absolutely exquisite in every way.
Even the more formal prose style, which for me required some warming up to, suited the story to a “T.”
The author’s critics, as she describes them, may find her scholarly credentials lacking. But she sounded every bit the fully capable scholar and academic to me: intelligent & insightful, well-read & knowledgeable and able to maintain a keen eye on posterity.
Aware of Ms. Bair’s awards and high praise, her success is no secret.

Well done “Deaaayrdh!”

excellent reader for engaging book

It was a great relief to find that the reader has an excellent command of French pronunciation—something essential for a book which continually references French names and places.

The most interesting aspect of the book is, naturally, Bair’s encounters with the two writers, Beckett and de Beauvoir. I learned a lot about the personalities of each. The other subject of the book is Bair’s own journey and development as a biographer, scholar, mother, wife…and particularly, her struggles to be heard and have agency as a professional in often hostile and sexist worlds and times. A fascinating book beautifully read.

Portrait of the artist as a portraitist

A fascinating look at a life as the author looks at the lives of others she has portrayed. A must for anyone interested in modernism, feminism or french culture.

Don't Normally make it my business to review

But this book was exceptionally disappointing. Not only does Bair lack any true depth of self reflection, she often is so entitled she somehow becomes convinced that the listener (reader) is going to be fascinated with petty academic squabbles. There is so little of the portraiture of either SBs, what most of us came for, that I would literally qualify the title as a lie.

She casually brings up her subjects for the biographies but only of their existence as props in her harried frenetic life where people are always trying to keep her down. This was nominated for a Pulitzer - my trust in accolades for anyone coming out of academia continues to drop exponentially.

Disappointing

This book is more about the author’s writing process than about the two subjects. Do not bother. The narrator is abrupt.