Zaza’s published letters contradict Beauvoir’s version of her friend’s life.

Evidence

Beauvoir’s collection, in turn, draws deeply on her personal experiences, parodies the conservative Catholic environment she grew up in, describes in “Marguerite” an intellectual world similar to “L’Enfance d’un chef,” but has its conclusion function as a manifesto for a new woman who will go out on her own and discover the world in all its freshness and complexity. Th e conclusion of Beauvoir’s autobiography, Mémoires d’une jeune fi lle rangée, deals in some detail with Zaza’s importance in Beauvoir’s life and underlines the crucial importance of her death: “Together we had struggled against a murky destiny that had it in for us and for a long time I have thought that she paid for my freedom with her death.” Since that time, Zaza’s correspondence and notebooks have been published, and they give quite a diff erent picture of her and, crucially, of her relationship with her mother. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 547

Categorization

• QUESTION: What specifically do Zaza’s correspondence and notebooks reveal about her and her mother that undercuts Beauvoir’s account?
• XREF: Connects to the broader historiographical debate about how Beauvoir shaped her own myth in her memoirs.