Words

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most famous people in the world when he sat down to write his autobiography of childhood. He was also, by his own account, one of the least reliable narrators of his own life — a man who had spent decades analysing the mechanisms of self-deception and who was constitutionally incapable of not applying those mechanisms to himself as he wrote.

The result is one of the most extraordinary memoirs in French literature. Words covers only the first ten years of Sartre’s life — his childhood with his mother and grandparents in Paris after his father’s early death — but it does so with the full force of the existentialist framework that Sartre had by then spent thirty years developing. He watches his childhood self constructing the identity of a literary prodigy, performing for adults, and investing everything in the vocation of writer — and he does so with both affection and devastating self-knowledge.

Deeply funny, ruthlessly honest, and one of the essential books for understanding how a philosopher becomes who they are. Winner of the Nobel Prize, famously declined by Sartre. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.