Simone De Beauvoir’s Inseparable: Book Review
Ada Lambert | April 20, 2023
French philosopher and feminist Simone de Beauvoir wrote a fiction novel called Inseparable in 1954— yet, the book had never seen the light of day until Oct. 2020, nearly forty years after her death.
It has been speculated that when de Beauvoir first wrote the novel, her long-term companion and fellow philosopher, Jean Paul Sartre, thought that there was no political significance to her book and deterred her from publishing it. Scholars also believe that the reason could be that de Beauvoir was not fond of fictitious biographies and did not feel the need to publish this novel because of that.
Inseparable follows the childhood of a young French girl named Sylvie and her blooming friendship with Andrée, whom she meets at Parisian Day School. The girls gravitate towards each other immediately, finding solace in their shared personality traits. Sylvie and Andrée are both hungry for knowledge, experience, and connection.
Sylvie is conflicted about her feelings for Andrée from the beginning. Andrée possesses a certain magic to her that Sylvie adores. While she never expresses any romantic feelings, there are many points in the novel where she expresses her fear of losing Andrée— “My joy transformed into anguish: what would become of me if she died? I wondered. I would be sitting on my little seat, the principal would come in and say in a serious voice, ‘Let us pray, dear children, your little friend Andrée Gallard was called to God last night.’ Well! It’s simple, I decided, I’d slip under my chair and fall dead as well!”
As the girls grow up together, they are faced with the societal and familial pressures on French women post-World War I. Andrée comes from a wealthy Catholic family and struggles to endure her mother’s unfeasible expectations. Due to her constant nagging responsibilities, Andrée is burdened by her yearning for a more autonomous life while still wishing to devote herself to her family and faith.
Sylvie, on the other hand, is not pressured by her family, nor does religion take up presence in her life. She decides at fourteen years old she does not believe in God. This does not affect her friendship with Andrée, and she never interferes with her dear friend’s devotion. Sylvie leads a very different life. She attends the Sorbonne and takes liberal courses in philosophy. Because of this, Andrée’s mother, Madame Gallard begins to disapprove of their friendship as the girls grow older. She thinks that Sylvie is bound to pollute Andrée’s good Catholic mind with her progressiveness.
Despite Madame Gallard’s opposition, the girls find a way to reconnect with each other over their many years of friendship. Sylvie sets Andrée up with a friend from the Sorbonne, Pascal. It is clear that Sylvie has an irrevocable, selfless love for Andrée that transcends personal gain and possessiveness. She continues to put Andrée’s happiness before her own, time after time and never complains.
I will not spoil the ending here, but it is important to know that this story is based on the real experience that de Beauvoir had as a child with a girl named Elisabeth ‘Zaza’ Lacoin. She virtually tells the story of her and Zaza’s friendship under fictitious circumstances. Zaza first appeared in de Beauvoir’s memoir “Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter” as a companion, platonic love interest, and alter ego of the young Beauvoir. Beauvoir describes meeting Zaza as the “blinding revelation’ by which ‘conventions, routines, and the careful categorization of emotions were swept away … by a flood of feeling that had no place in any code.”
Inseparable is a gut-wrenching, yet enamoring coming-of-age story that explores identity, gender, sexuality, and the profoundness of true friendship. It also presents the struggle of being— how there is such a suffocating weight in living for others. De Beauvoir aims to answer this existential question: what price do we pay living only to please?
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