How To Be Authentic by Skye C. Cleary

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What Simone de Beauvoir can teach us about how to live.

The French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’. Her book The Second Sex went on to lay the groundwork for second-wave feminism and inspire thinkers such as Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Kate Millett.

Yet it wasn’t in a gender studies class, but in a business school lecture that Skye Cleary first encountered Beauvoir. Struggling her way out of a finance job and ambivalently paired with a boyfriend sceptical of her ambition, Cleary found a wake up call in Beauvoir’s ideas: about how to live freely in a world full of chains, how to strive for authenticity and how, for women, to live is to rebel. After a decisive pivot, Cleary decided to devote her career to exploring – and living a life inspired by - Beauvoir.

In HOW TO BE AUTHENTIC, Cleary reveals how Beauvoir’s thought can help us all become more attuned to living purposefully, thoughtfully, and with vitality. Drawing on her own experiences as well as the ideas of other existentially rebellious women thinkers, Cleary explains – in chapters on happiness, friendship and parenting, among others – why Beauvoir’s philosophy remains such a compelling way to think about how to live and love.

Existential philosophy emerged out of a postwar moment of despair and loss of meaning, and we live in similarly troubled – and seemingly unprecedented – times. HOW TO BE AUTHENTIC ultimately offers a guide to help us navigate the absurdity of being in the world today.

SKYE C. CLEARY has devoted her life to popularizing the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. A philosopher, writer and popular lecturer, she teaches at Barnard College, City College of New York, and Columbia University, and has lectured on love and philosophy at institutions and venues all over the world. She previously served as the associate director of the Center for New Narratives in Philosophy at Columbia University, which supports research on women and other marginalized groups in the history of philosophy. She is the author of EXISTENTIALISM AND ROMANTIC LOVE (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and is co-editor, with Massimo Pigliucci and Daniel Kaufman, of the anthology HOW TO LIVE A GOOD LIFE (Vintage, 2020). Her writing has appeared in Aeon, the Paris Review, the Independent, the HuffPost, Business Insider, the New Republic and Quartz, among other outlets. She lives with her husband and son in New York City.

Agent: Tisse Takagi

Publisher: St Martin’s Press (US)/Ebury (UK) Publication: 10 May 2022 Status: Manuscript Length: 256 pages

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