A Life in Letters

Many of these missives are dashed-off notes from camp—a daughter assuaging a mother’s anxiety about her welfare, or scolding her for it, or asking for cigarettes and coffee filters, or reporting cheerfully on a tour of Italy,…or threatening that she ‘won ’t eat for two weeks’ if Mime sends her a care package she hasn’t asked for. Yet they humanize Weil the icon by the very fact of their banality, and by their poignant testimony to her umbilical dependence as a child who never really left home. -- Judith Thurman * New Yorker *
This book confirms that Simone Weil was saintly—all the way to the tips of her fingernails. Her letters allow us to take a peek at the interaction between her intellectual life and her private life. -- Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
Simone Weil’s radical empathy illuminates every page of A Life in Letters. Alternating between the quotidian and the quotable, this extraordinary collection allows us to eavesdrop on Weil’s innermost thoughts, opening a window into the heart and mind of a philosopher whose iconoclastic insights are more relevant than ever. -- Eric Weiner, author of The Socrates Express
These letters are a gift for those who love the writings of Simone Weil but wish to learn more of the wild complexities of her life, and their impact on those dear to her. -- Janet Soskice, author of The Sisters of Sinai
Simone Weil is something of an otherworldly figure, at once distant and fascinating, like God, the ultimate nature of reality, and death itself. These letters bring Weil closer to us, even as they make her personality look even more complex. We learn a great deal about Weil from these letters, and yet somehow that only enhances her mystery. Read this book. -- Costica Bradatan, author of In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility
These beautifully translated letters, more casual than her essays and journals, weave together the mundane and the extraordinary. They reveal a woman who continued to grapple with ancient Greek math and to teach herself Babylonian even as she and her family were imperiled by World War II. Her exemplary life and writings inspire us to live more rigorously, and we’re fortunate that these letters are at last available in English. -- Karen Olsson, author of The Weil Conjectures
Appearing for the first time in English, the letters Weil writes to her parents show a different facet of her life and character than we have previously been able to see. They introduce readers to new dimensions of her singularly important philosophy. The introduction by Robert Chenavier is most helpful and informative. Both engrossing and illuminating, this book will appeal not just to Weil's devotees, but also to historians, art critics, literary scholars, and philosophers. -- Françoise Meltzer, author of Dark Lens: Imaging Germany, 1945