THE IMAGE OF HER

A new translation of a 1966 novel by French thinker and literary powerhouse de Beauvoir, in which a mother’s life is upended by a daughter’s question.

Young, pretty, upper-class, and Parisian, Laurence has it all: a handsome husband, two charming daughters, a job as an advertising executive, an ardent lover. At her mother Dominique’s weekend house, their influential guests talk about the assured rosiness of the future. But Laurence’s life is like one of the advertisements she designs, depicting a perfection impossible to deliver. When her mother inquires politely about her children, Laurence knows her answers mustn’t be “in any way worrying, or even detailed.” Listlessness and doubts afflict her. Since childhood, she’s followed the rules, doing what’s expected. “I would have liked to sit down in the dark with a little girl when I was that age, and laugh and whisper,” she thinks when her 10-year-old daughter brings home a new friend. “But Dominique always said: I’m sure she’s very nice, your little friend, but my poor girl, she’s so ordinary.” When, one night at bedtime, Laurence’s daughter asks, “Why do we exist?,” Laurence can’t get the question out of her head. Then her strong-willed mother, jilted by her lover for a 19-year-old, reveals her despair at being without a man. Moving between third- and first-person points of view, de Beauvoir shows us Laurence from different angles, exploring her inner crisis in crystalline prose. “What should she do? Merely asking the question flusters her...Things happen to me, that’s all.” Though the book is 60 years old, the issues it addresses—about happiness, autonomy, mothers, daughters, the reasons for existence—feel utterly topical. As the novel progresses, Laurence becomes determined to protect her daughter; she wants to give her a chance. "To do what? She doesn’t even know."

A deceptively slim volume, at once domestic and philosophical.