I had already picked this book out as the Scares You category for the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge when I heard about Todd. But it did add a little umami to the conflict. I’ve lost much of my family to cancer, and often very young. So although I don’t have a parent left to lose as Mlle. de Beauvoir, I still fear losing a loved one or going through it myself. It’s not a horror book like many people might have selected, but it certainly fits the category.
This book is the first of Simone de Beauvoir’s that I’ve read even though Robert B. Parker really flacked for The Second Sex back in the early Spenser books. Maybe he only mentioned it once but I read the book a bunch. But it deals with the, what, maybe month from the time her mother went in for a relatively routine procedure in the middle 1960s to her mother’s death from cancer. Apparently, the doctors figured it was pretty bad to begin with, but nobody told the mother so that she would be in good spirits.
So the book is partly a description of those days, although Mlle. de Beauvoir was not the attentive daughter tending to her mother constantly–that was her sister–but Mlle. de Beauvoir came back from trips behind the Iron Curtain once or twice when travelling and when it looked like her mother took a turn, and she did visit frequently in Paris. She also delves into her mother’s life a bit, telling us her interpretation of her mother’s bourgeous life and projecting unhappiness on her where the mother would not have claimed it was so–apparently, the father was a Frenchman, and he might or might not have had a number of lovers. Mlle. de Beauvoir therefore casts judgment upon her mother and, well, not vows to not lead a middle class life, but affirms her decision to live the mid-century French existentialist writer lifestyle. David Brooks coined the term Bohemian bourgeoisie in Bobos in Paradise, but his diagnosis was probably forty years after the French invented it. And adding Bohemian to it makes it sound hipper than it really is. I would call it simply New Bou since the values and ethics that replaced the old middle-class morality and “inauthenticity” of some degree of stoicism in the public face really did not depend upon being cool and artsy. Merely in following the herd that the French Existentialist and probably just any “artist” who could afford to go to Europe in the early part of the 20th century could afford to espouse.
Where was I going? I don’t know. All I know is the book triggered a little dread in me as I remembered my own mother’s death lo those 16 years ago from cancer and did a little self-flagellation in wondering if I could have / should have done more (yes). So “Scares You”? Yes.
It reminded me a whole lot of Anna Quindlen’s One True Thing which I read, what, almost thirty years ago when it was fresh and I got it from the Quality Paperback Club in one of those instances where I bought four books for a buck back in the 1990s when I thought I should read more literary fiction. I even saw the film at some point. It definitely has the same vibe, a combination of losing her mother and judging her mother at the same time. I more recently read Love’s Legacy by Stephanie Dalla Rosa which was also about losing her mother to cancer, but written a bit at a remove has her mother has already passed, and her mother’s diary helped the author eventually overcome her pain and return to her faith. So it’s a completely different focus, but another daughter loses her mother to cancer book.
You know, I can’t think of a book by a man talking about losing his father to cancer. I’m not sure that our relationships and emotions and regrets are any less complicated. I suppose we’re just less likely to work through them verbally in the form of a book.
At any rate, one more book down on my quest for 15 in the first two months. Which will actually not be fifteen on my annual list as two come from a single volume. Which is what I have to remind myself as I near completion of one form and it does not align with the tally on another.
