By now, we’re all familiar with Dolly Alderton‘s remarkable take on female friendships in Everything I Know About Love. Despite her immaculate portrayal of the significance of friends in coming of age, Simone de Beauvoir, one of the reasons for feminism as it is today, had already expressed this feeling 70 years ago.
Published posthumously in 2021 after having been deemed too “intimate” for the social context of 1954, The Inseparables unveils the friendship of two free-thinking women as Simone de Beauvoir falls in love with Elizabeth Lacoin’s intellect.
Zaza, to whom Simone has recurrently attributed her own grandeur, grew up in a traditional bourgeois parisian family and had much of her effervent nature pruned by the repressive high-society standards bestowed upon her. She is depicted fictionally under the persona of Andrée, alongside Sylvie as a pseudonym for Simone herself.
Not a single conversation they share falls short of existential and analytical, with their unmatched drive for academic excellence bonding them in youth, steering them both to the world-renowned Sorbonne.
As fate would have it, only one of them had the chance to graduate: both due to the expectation that Andrée became a housewife, and to an unforeseen illness that brought her life to an end at the age of 21.
Everything de Beauvoir accomplished since has been tainted by the thought of her short-lived companionship with a woman who was, in her words, “spiritually murdered.” She did, however, view Zaza’s death as a necessary sacrifice for her to reach new heights and revolutionise what it meant to be a woman, claiming she had “paid for my own freedom with her death.”
In 2025, a book like this feels like a warm embrace to any “problem child,” “thought daughter,” or existential soul looking for comfort in the timeless concept of sisterhood.
Book cover of “The Inseparables” by Simone de Beauvoir