A Very Easy Death
1964 memoir by Simone de Beauvoir
A Very Easy Death (French: Une mort très douce) is a short book written by existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir documenting her experience in the weeks leading up to her mother's death in 1963. The book, published in French in 1964, is both a biographical and autobiographical work, recounting the life of her mother, Françoise de Beauvoir, as well as Simone de Beauvoir's own. Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir's lifelong partner, considered this book Beauvoir's best work.
Background
While away on a trip to Rome, Beauvoir received news that her mother fell in her apartment and broke her femur. To recover from the fall, Françoise was taken to a clinic. However, at the clinic, a more life threatening health concern emerged: Françoise had terminal intestinal cancer. Beauvoir kept a journal throughout her mother's illness, which she used to write A Very Easy Death in December 1963, after her death. While Beauvoir recorded the way her friends, Jacques-Laurent Bost, Olga Kosakiewicz, and Claude Lanzmann, supported her during this difficult time in her journal, not much of this subject is written in the book. As described in the text, Françoise's caretakers decide to keep her diagnosis of terminal cancer secret from her in order to not dash her hopes of recovery; this practice of keeping the true diagnosis from the patient was not uncommon in France at this time.
Motivation for writing
One motivation for writing was Beauvoir's desire to record a more complete picture of her mother, including the good years in their relationship, than appeared in her earlier memoirs, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter or The Prime of Life.
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