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Whose story deserves to be told? Is your story worth telling only if you have accomplished great things, or is it worth the newspaper only if others can identify with it?

If you are going to tell your story, what is the best way to tell it?

As I read "Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter" by Simone de Beauvoir, I asked myself those questions again and again.

Years ago, I read Beauvoir's "The Mandarins" and "The Second Sex," both great books. So when a philosophy professor friend of mine recommended her autobiography, I jumped at the chance to read it.

Beauvoir was a lifelong friend of philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and lived at an exciting time in the Paris intellectual scene. I imagined the story she would choose to tell about herself would be of that time, when she was writing and theorizing and spending time with the greatest philosophical minds of her generation.

Instead, her story begins at birth and slowly plods, page by page, through her self-centered childhood, her awkward adolescence and her confused college years.

By the end of the book, she does meet Sartre, and she even reprints one of the letters he wrote to her in the early years of their friendship.

The book ends with the death of a close friend and then drops off, like a road ending at the edge of a cliff.

I read through this book always thinking that the story was going somewhere. It succeeded in painting a portrait of bourgeois France at the early part of the last century and helped you understand the psychological underpinnings of Beauvoir's later philosophies. Unless you are interested in such things, this is a dull read.