Three short stories—one more depressing than the next. I had only read Simone De Beauvoir’s feminist stuff—never her fiction. Well the truth in these stories is cruel and sharp.

“Not to me! I am not the kind of mother that is lied to; not the kind of wife that is lied to. Idiotic vanity. All women think that they are different; they all think there are some things that will never happen to them; and they are all wrong.”