The Woman Destroyed

Or: My road map through adulthood

I first read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Woman Destroyed in my freshman seminar at Beloit College in the fall of 1991. I’ve returned to it many times over the years, captivated each time by a different one of the three stories it contains.

For a long time “The Monologue,” the second in the collection, was my favorite. A woman alone in her Paris…