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LRB.combe forward slash listen. That's LRB.m.m. forward slash listen. Hello and welcome to the London Review of Books

podcast. My name's Thomas Jones. And today I'm talking to my colleague Joanna Biggs, who's written a piece in the current issue of the LRB on Simone de Beauvoir. It's a review of three books, Becoming Beauvoir A Life by Kate Kirkpatrick, Parisian Lives, Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and me, a memoir by Deirdre Rie Baer,

and the second volume of Boisdre's Diary of a Philosophy student, 1928 to 29, translated by Barbara Claude. But it's also a personal essay about Joanna's own changing view of and relationship with Beauvoir,

as a writer, as a thinker, as a historical figure, as a person. Hello, Jo. Hi. So I thought if we begin where your

peace begins with that question that Beauvoir was asked more than once why she'd never written

a female character who lived a free life. And her first reply was to say that I've shown women as they are, as divided human beings, and not as they ought to be.

And I think your piece sets out to show her as a divided human being, not as who she ought to be, nor as people think she ought to be.

And then you quote a later interview in which she replied,

there's a certain demandingness that I find a little stupid,

because it imprisons me, completely fixing me in a kind of feminist concrete block.

And your piece sort of begins with that concrete block and how to demolish it, as it were.

It's funny seeing having you repeat the beginning back to me because actually I realised I didn't start where Beauvoir started.

I started with the concrete block. I started backwards.

And that sort of was the whole struggle of the piece

for me, I suppose. So I knew her more for her philosophy through studying her as a student.

I was really lucky to be taught by Elizabeth Follays and Suzanne Dow when I was at Oxford. And

and so I always had this notion of her.

I had the concrete block notion totally.

And I loved it, man, when I lived to live in Paris.

And I was in Place Saint-re-Baudvoir.

And all I could afford was a coffee at the Café de Floor.

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