A Very Easy Death

Nowhere is de Beauvoir's rigorous honesty more visible than in this haunting account of the death of her mother... As she charts her last weeks and her abasement at the hands of doctors and illness, both hostility and unexpected love play themselves out on the page.
Lisa Appignanesi, author of Everyday Madness.
Long considered one of Simone de Beauvoir's masterpieces, A Very Easy Death is a profoundly affecting, day-by-day recounting of her mother's final days after she is hospitalized following a fall.
Though a devout Catholic, her faith is subsumed by her terror of death, and as her body fails, she clings to life with fierce, primal desperation. In depicting her mother's refusal to ‘go gentle' while her autonomy and dignity are taken from her,
Simone de Beauvoir ‘shows the power of compassion when it is allied with acute intelligence' (Sunday Telegraph).