A Disgraceful Affair: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Bianca Lamblin-Women's Life Writings from Around the World

In this tell-all memoir, Lamblin evens the score between herself and renowned French thinkers-and lovers-de Beauvoir and Sartre. Their menage a trois-begun in 1938 when Lamblin was a 17-year-old student of de Beauvoir (who was 29)-ended when Sartre dismissed her, at de Beauvoir's instigation, right after the outbreak of WW II. The two women maintained a 40-year friendship after the war, but later Lamblin became enraged at de Beauvoir's humiliating account of their threesome in Letters to Sartre, published posthumously, although Lamblin's real name was not used. She also declares the two failed to appreciate the danger to which she was exposed during the war because she was a Jew, and she takes issue with many of the details in Deirdre Bair's Simone de Beauvoir. Whatever one may conclude from the affair, this memoir is fueled by spite rather than insight. Photos not seen by PW. (Apr.)