He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written-or even read-a biography herself. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted Ph.D. As recently as 2017, a friend of a writer she knows asked him how many times Bair had slept with Beckett to gain his cooperation.National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen 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. Over the next seven years, despite being shunned by Beckett scholars, manipulated by his friends and propositioned by countless sources, Bair persevered, eventually winning the National Book Award.įor her second subject, she chose Beauvoir because she “appeared to be the only contemporary role model who had made a success of both her personal and her professional lives, and I was searching desperately for someone to tell me how to do the same.”īair’s indefatigable energy and can-do attitude are likely to inspire a new generation of writers and biographers working in a field where the boundaries between genres - memoir, fiction, autobiography, biography - aren’t as clear as they once were.īut some things never change. then held) a writer steeped in alienation, isolation, and despair, but rather one who was deeply rooted in his Irish heritage.” To her surprise, he agreed. She had written to Beckett with “the grandiose idea” of demonstrating that he “was not (as the reigning view. “Although feminist theory was on the upswing,” Bair writes, “women were told (mostly by men) that they could never achieve success because their subjects were not worthy of study, and besides, when they did write, they approached their topics with too much timidity to make them authoritative.”īair, 84, was anything but shy.

Now Bair has drawn on her so-called Daily Diaries to produce “Parisian Lives,” a “curious hybrid,” or “bio-memoir,” of biography and memoir.įor readers, it’s a “three-fer”: two brief but vivid and absorbing portraits of Beckett and Beauvoir, and a searing account of Bair’s evolving feminist consciousness as a novice biographer trying to launch a career, raise kids and run a household in the early 1970s, when women were just starting to tell their own stories, and those of other women, in earnest.

Parisian Lives by Deirdre Bair