Simone de Beauvoir’s The Inseparables
With Charlie’s Literature Club 
11.08.2025                    Charlie Trenerry

    Simone de Beauvoir, photographed by Roger Violett in 1945


The Book Room at Byron is a special place to me. Bright, warm, quiet, friendly. Staffed entirely with people who love books as much as me or you–just what you want from a good bookshop. One particular staff member, much to my delight, took to quizzing me. 

One day, wandering aimless and bored looking for a beach book (not necessarily beach-related, just one to stand up against the salt and the sand dunes), I picked up Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and was told, in no uncertain terms, that I was to have it memorised and ready to recite the next time I came in. 

I did. 

In return, he offered that the next time I wanted to order a book in, he’d drop it to me at my house in Lilli Pilli on his way home from work. Another mark, I think, of a damn good bookshop. 

Now this preamble has (some) relevance, I promise.

It’s not often that you wander (as I’ve mentioned I am wont to do) into your favourite local bookstore and are remembered well enough to be asked if you’ve read the new release from an author almost forty years dead. Not often that happens no matter how great the bookstore–because of the forty years dead aspect. But one day a few years ago, this statistically rare occurrence occurred to me.

It took me a while to decide on the right time to pick her up and dive in. As a long-time, almost life-time lover of De Beauvoir’s, I knew The Inseparables would not be easy to put down, nor would it be easy to forgive Simone for what she’d done to me by the time I did. As usual, I was right. 

I will try my best to share this experience with you.

There is the fear, innate, I think, in so many of us, that the more we change, the more we may lose. That growth, or regression, or just sideways shuffles, will result in the lack of recognition, or familiarity, or connection with those we love. We hold such a deep and intrinsic desire to be known, and to be loved for it. 

In childhood, this is easy. There is no pretence. We are as we are because there is no ‘as we were’. Nobody has known us before now and we have not known ourselves. What reason could a child have to desire to be anything but who and what they are? Pressure from outside the self exists, of course, but it has not yet had time to settle in, to change our shape, carve anything into or out of us. It is, at most, fingerprints in the clay.

Childhood friendships then, forged in joy and first experiences, in skinned knees and mild (though at the time high-octane) rebellion, are perhaps the most pure, the most precious. 

Thus we are brought, at last, to Simone de Beauvoir and Elisabeth Lecoin. Our Inseparables. Their character translations in the book, Sylvie and Andree, respectively. De Beauvoir’s passion for her childhood friend transcends this piece, transcends many of her published pieces. 

The Inseparables, written in 1954, just five years after the publication of The Second Sex, was deemed too intimate to publish in her lifetime, and we were not blessed with its release until October 2020. We open with Sylvie’s fascination, borderline obsession, with a new arrival at her school. Andree is confident, bold, talented and irreverent. Sylvie is enraptured. The two girls become close, then closer. Those fingerprints I mentioned of external influence mould Andree deeply, as Sylvie watches on and on, wondering how she can possibly compete with these other attachments, commitments. How can she compete with a daughter’s love for her mother, or for a young man? How can she compete with God? 

From my years of deep perusal, I truly believe this esteemed writer spent the better part of her life attempting to commit Elisabeth or ‘Zaza’ to the page; attempting to encapsulate all she was, and all the love our author had for her, in the ink. I doubt she ever felt she succeeded. 

Long, intellectual, and philosophical discussions between Andree and Sylvie (taboo for women at the time, even without the subcontext), lead to questions of faith and marriage. Andree poses these to Sylvie, and they discuss their futures. “They teach you in catechism to respect your body,” Andree explains. “So selling your body in marriage must be as bad as selling it on the street”. 

As time wears on and values change, in the world, within their families, and within themselves, there is friction, and fear, and the kind of frustration and miscommunication that only comes with youth and the unwillingness to admit one’s love for another. The forced invulnerability of naivety. 

Simone de Beauvoir loved Zaza from the moment they met, and for her entire life. She dedicated a piece of herself to that other girl when she first saw her rail against a teacher, do a cartwheel, steal a little wine at a picnic. When she saw Zaza mournfully play the violin alone in the grasses, she grieved with her, for the life she had envisioned for them both.

There is a theme throughout de Beauvoir’s writing - to live with intention. “Be necessary,” as she says. The Inseparables carries this theme strongly, and is perhaps where the idea first blossomed for Simone de Beauvoir– but it is one of her most tragic. With full context, devastating. And there is some kind of cruelty in the realism of it; these familiar fears. Being left behind, or eclipsed. Losing someone for changing or shifting or holding on too tight. But if you can read through these little pains of terror and growth, to the love and the intensity and strangeness of womanhood; rebellious intelligence and a world against it all–it’s tender. 

From open to close, it truly is tender. An ode, to a woman she loved and perhaps to herself. At its core it is a love story. And a dedication. And a diary. A tale of childhood friendship, a tale of obsession and calamitous love, a tale of aching loss. 


And all that in 123 pages.