An Inconceivable Relationship?

Your June 28 article (“ ‘Mother of Us All’ Is Pushed From Pedestal”) on the new biography of Simone de Beauvoir by Deirdre Blair, and Blair’s reconstruction of the writer’s life, merits the following comment:

How Simone de Beauvoir lived her sex life doesn’t really merit a book to be written about the subject. As to her relationship with Jean Paul Sartre, both seemed to have found it convenient. She was known and will be remembered as la femme de Sartre. Their relationship transcended from the sexual to the fraternal, a sexless friendship between man and woman that American women writers, above all, cannot conceive.

PHIL M. ISLAS

Tarzana