A zippy biographer’s tale in sync with Shoot the Widow (2007), by Meryle Secrest The Shadow in the Garden(2017), by James Atlas and This Long Pursuit (2017), by Richard Holmes.

Bubbling with piquant profiles, astounding anecdotes, and illuminating insights into the ethics of and obstacles to biography, Bair’s look-back makes all the more remarkable her subsequent and exceptional biographies of Anaïs Nin, Carl Jung, Saul Steinberg, and Al Capone. National Book Awardwinning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her 15 remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate. Yet, as she records in this riveting tale of literary courage, she spent an arduous decade portraying Simone de Beauvoir. Though she won the National Book Award, Bair decided that she would never write another biography. She chronicles difficult separations from her family, conducting hundreds of interviews, exhausting struggles for funding, the cruelty of turf-defending academics, and, at every turn, rampant sexism. In this gripping “bio-memoir,” Bair candidly, dramatically, and sometimes bemusedly recounts the shocking adversity, both devious and outright vicious, that she encountered throughout the seven long years she worked diligently on her groundbreaking book.

Married with two children when she entered graduate school, her fascination with Samuel Beckett and his work inspired her to leap into biography, a literary endeavor she knew nothing about. Bair had no idea of what she was getting herself into when she decided to leave journalism for literature.

Samuel Beckett by Deirdre Bair