Happy Birthday, Simone de Beauvoir!
INTERVIEWER
In every one of your novels we find a female character who is misled by false notions and who is threatened by madness.
DE BEAUVOIR
Lots of modern women are like that. Women are obliged to play at being what they aren’t, to play, for example, at being great courtesans, to fake their personalities. They’re on the brink of neurosis. I feel very sympathetic toward women of that type. They interest me more than the well-balanced housewife and mother. There are, of course, women who interest me even more, those who are both true and independent, who work and create.
“One should aim at inventing without fabricating.” —Simone de Beauvoir, who was born on this day in 1908.