Alone with her husband, she gradually becomes aware of his concealments and actual lies that hide the fact that he is not really “eaten up by his profession” The way I approached a question, my habit of mind, the way I looked at things, what I took for granted - all this was myself and it did not seem to me that I could alter it.” it's a collection of three stories about women past youth who, in short, are having lives they thought were settled suddenly cleaved into before and after. the first one was my favorite, five stars for it, but all three were clever and captivating and it's 4.5 altogether.

In “The Monologue”, the shortest of these stories, written in a stream-of-consciousness style, we read the feverish claim of a woman filled with rage and frustration after a lifetime of deceptions that perhaps she has forged for herself. A lifetime of pushing away the people she loves that seems hopeless. In three “immensely intelligent stories about the decay of passion” ( The Sunday Herald Times [London]), Simone de Beauvoir draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises.And it’s the same thing everywhere all the time whether they’re stuffing themselves with chips paella or pizza it’s the same crew a filthy crew the rich who trample over you the poor who hate you for your money the old who dodder the young who sneer the men who show off the women who open their legs. I’d rather stay at home reading a thriller although they’ve become so dreary nowadays. The TV too what a clapped-out set of fools! I was made for another planet altogether I mistook the way.” My overflowing leisure handed me the world and at the same time prevented me from seeing it. Just as the sun, filtering through the closed venetian blinds on a hot afternoon, makes the whole magnificence of summer blaze in my mind; whereas if I face its direct harsh glare it blinds me.”

The title story, “The Woman Destroyed,” is told in a more modified tone; but the undercurrent of despair builds to uncontrolled proportions. In this monologue, the woman tells of a comfortable life that is being washed away by her husband’s affair with another woman. Witty, immensely adroit … These three women are believable individuals presented with a wry mixture of sympathy and exasperation.” Each of these novellas is concerned with a desperately unhappy, no-longer-young woman whose life is going down the drain. Three such monologues, in succession, are an overdose. At the same time, none of the husbands or other characters in any of the stories take on a convincing life of their own. The Woman Destroyed," the final story and the title of the collection, is a long series of diary entries by Monique, a fortyish upper-middle-class Parisian housewife with two grown daughters and a husband, Maurice, who is a medical researcher. Maurice has been seeing Noëllie, an ambitious young lawyer, and the entire story concerns the effect that this has on Monique. Maurice won't give up Noëllie and doesn't want to give up Monique either. Monique, for her part, wants Maurice to dump Noëllie, but she makes no progress, and by the end of the story he is getting a separate apartment for himself. Most of the discussion concerns what Monique did or didn't do right, speculation on Noëllie's character and support from friends, her children and a psychiatrist. By the end of the story, Monique has lost a lot of weight, is depressed and is heavily medicated. Even if one is neither vain nor self-obsessed, it is so extraordinary to be oneself - exactly oneself and no one else - and so unique, that it seems natural that one should also be unique for someone else.”She smiled rather pityingly. "But, Mama, after fifteen years of marriage it is perfectly natural to stop loving one's wife. It's the other thing that would be astonishing!" Simone de Beauvoir draws us into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises. Three long stories that draw the reader into the lives of three women, all past their first youth, all facing unexpected crises. In the middle tale, the tone is strident, the pitch continuously noisy, rising over and over again to a hysterical note. “The silly bastards!” the woman cries at the first gasp. Her accusing, despairing monologue goes on and on about the ghastly mess in which she is drowning: a woman separated from her child and “ditched” by his “swine of a father.”