[Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre] is a deliberate affront to conventional notions of privacy and dignity. It's an exact, stoical account of Sartre's disintegration during his last 10 years, and in writing it Simone de Beauvoir is testifying, with a kind of obstinate scrupulosity, to their shared freedom from all such conventional decencies as would—for example—keep a great man's image 'intact.'

'Honesty suited us,' she said in a 1973 interview—as though too much truth might be damaging in less extraordinary lives. And there's something of the same pride in the writing here. Sartre's dying, you are meant to feel, is watchable because he had himself unfolded the possibilities of his experience (in the books, in his political life) so honestly. The book is as much a matter of keeping the record straight as a labour of love, from this point of view, and indeed the...