Parisian Lives

In "Parisian Lives" Deirdre Bair unfolds her fifteen years in Paris while portraying the two literary giants Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir.

In 1971 Deirdre Bair managed to secure access to the Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett and to write his biography even though the journalist and PhD never had written or even read a biography! It took seven year of deep research, intimate conversations and many chases after the writer before it all resulted in "Samuel Beckett: A Biography" that won the National Book Award. After this Deirdre Bair had her eyes on her new subject: Simone de Beauvoir. But even though Beckett and Beauvoir lived on the same street they couldn’t stand each other! In "Parisian Lives" Deirdre Bair shares her captivating and warm stories of how she managed to portrait two of modern literatures biggest authors with new and never-before-told anecdotes and personal details about her life in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir.