This October, journalist Alexandra Schwartz published a short piece in the New Yorker praising Joan Acocella’s lively essay “The Frog and the Crocodile,” published in the same magazine twenty-seven years ago.¹ While reflecting on Simone de Beauvoir’s unlikely romance with Nelson Algren (Beauvoir called Nelson her big crocodile; he called her his little frog), Acocella characterized Beauvoir’s relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre as “depressing” and suggested that the philosopher took advantage of Beauvoir, getting her to correct all of his manuscripts while he went off with his other paramours. “This servitude to Sartre damaged not just her reputation but also her self-esteem and her femininity,” wrote Acocella. While I, like Schwartz, admire the story Acocella tells of Beauvoir’s sexual awakening, I am perplexed by Acocella’s claim that Beauvoir’s “femininity” became somehow damaged. What troubles me more, however, is that younger critics like Schwartz reinforce Acocella’s rather inaccurate depiction of the philosopher. “The challenge of evaluating Beauvoir,” writes Schwartz, “is that both her life and her work were extraordinary in ways that are deeply, bafflingly contradictory. How could the woman who wrote so piercingly about women’s subjugation subjugate herself to not just one but two men?” It is a shame that a woman writer who refused, twice, to marry a man she loved so that she could preserve her independence, and who prioritized her writing over her romantic relationships, is still famous for having “subjugated herself.” Beauvoir pursued unconventional intimate relationships throughout her life, not only with Sartre and Algren but also with Zaza, Claude Lanzmann, Sylvie Le Bon, and others. The problem, perhaps, is that we have not yet done justice to these ambiguous and rewarding relationships—relationships that cannot be boiled down to subjugator and subjugated.

The three reviews in this issue invite us to enrich our thinking about different sorts of relationships. In the first, Marine Rouch, author of Chère Simone de Beauvoir, argues that, with Beauvoir et Sartre. Écrire côte à côte, Esther Demoulin has produced a remarkable account of the two writers’ partnership that opens up new avenues of research.² Researchers tend either to sacralize “Sartrébeauvoir” or to argue that one was a greater thinker than the other; Demoulin, according to Rouch, proposes a new, more nuanced approach to understanding their unusual dynamic.³ Rather than simply asking who influenced whom, Demoulin performs an intricate cross-reading and genetic analysis of both writers’ works. Rouch points out that Demoulin’s book would be richer had the author compared Beauvoir and Sartre’s relationship to that of other couples, such as Suzanne Roussi and Aimé Césaire. Moreover, she suggests that a comparison of how the two authors engaged with their audiences (Beauvoir carried on sustained epistolary conversations with her readers; this practice interested Sartre less) would have been fruitful. But despite some reservations about Demoulin’s methodology, Rouch claims that Beauvoir et Sartre. Écrire côte à côte not only brings together the fields of Beauvoir and Sartre Studies in groundbreaking ways but also paves the way for other investigations into the “socio-histoire” of literary couples.

In the second review, Oliver Davis, professor of French at University College Cork and coauthor of the recent Hatred of Sex, commends Tamara Chaplin for producing a “towering scholarly achievement” with her new book, Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France.⁴ Chaplin writes about many new archival sources, including letters readers sent to the lesbian journals and recordings of fans calling into 1980s lesbian radio shows. Her book will be of interest to any scholar researching the relationships between famous lesbian figures and their audiences. Davis particularly admires Chaplin’s discussion of how French television shows represented lesbian identity during the 1950s and ’60s. A provocative question recurs throughout Davis’s review: Would some of the lesbians whom Chaplin studies have still become lesbians if other identities were available to them? And what would a trans-revisionist reading of Chaplin’s sources look like? At stake in these different possible readings, concludes Davis, “is both the historical intelligibility and political future of hard-won collective identities and, at the same time, the ethical demands for transgender justice and queer solidarity.”

Finally, David Sorfa, senior lecturer in film studies at the University of Edinburgh, reviews Lori Jo Marso’s Feminism and the Cinema of Experience, about which I had the pleasure of chatting with Marso in June at the 2025 International Simone de Beauvoir Society Conference.⁵ Marso writes about a variety of late twentieth-century and contemporary films and television shows, and Sorfa notes that it is refreshing to see a scholar ignore “the rather forced distinction between ‘cinema’ and ‘television.’ ” He also enjoys how Marso draws attention to her own lived experience of teaching films throughout the book. Her text is unusual in that it considers all kinds of affective relationships: character/director, film/viewer, student/teacher. After synthesizing Marso’s argument that feeling like a feminist entails airing uncomfortable feelings, Sorfa raises an important question: While it is surely a good idea to accept that your feelings may be nonnormative and may make even you uncomfortable, should we make room for all feelings, even if they are problematic? Ultimately, Sorfa claims that Feminism and the Cinema of Experience makes a compelling case for us to develop forms of “compassionate pessimism.”

Rereading these reviews while writing this note, I felt more convinced than ever that we must talk—in and outside the classroom—about complex relationships and the feelings they generate. OpenAI has just announced that it will soon release a new version of ChatGPT that will create erotica for adults, despite research that shows how intense and often dangerous users’ emotional attachments to this artificial intelligence can be.⁶ “Why do you fall in love?” Beauvoir wrote in 1965. “Nothing could be more complex: because it is winter, because it is summer; from overwork, from too much leisure; from weakness, from strength; a need for security, a taste for danger.”⁷ If there is one author who understood just how rewarding and strange loving relationships are, who never tired of writing about her intimate relationships, and who continually asks us to rethink our relationships to ourselves and to others, it is Beauvoir. Now is an excellent time to rediscover her books and discover Demoulin’s, Chaplin’s, and Marso’s new ones.