A short, moving memoir about the last weeks of Beauvoir's mother, who enters hospital after a fall and is found to be seriously ill. Beauvoir describes the hospital routine, the hopes and fears of the family, and her own mixed feelings of tenderness and old resentment. She reflects on how modern medicine and society treat dying and on the gap between comfort and truth. The book is plain, honest and restrained, and it remains one of her most widely read works.