Inside story …

… Bair, Beauvoir, and the Becketeers | The Russell Kirk Center.

… as the book progresses, she becomes more and more emotionally involved with the story she’s telling, as if we were talking to her at a cocktail party and she needed a few drinks to loosen up. By the book’s midpoint, she is perfectly willing to tell us about the boorish behavior of John Montague, an Irish friend of Beckett’s who invited himself and his family to live with the Bairs for six weeks. And she’s certainly willing to talk about her mistreatment at the hands of the overwhelmingly male Academy and especially the academic Beckett cult—or, as she amusingly calls them, the Becketeers.