book one.

I chose yesterday, January 9th, to start my first official Beauvoir novel. It would have been her 105th birthday.

I was born at 4 o'clock in the morning on the 9th of January 1908 in a room fitted with white-enamelled furniture and over looking the boulevard Raspail. In the family photographs taken the following summer can be seen ladies in long dresses and ostrich-feather hats and gentlemen wearing boaters and panamas, all smiling at a baby; they are my parents, my grandfather, uncles, aunts; and the baby is me. - Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Book One