Glossy pictures

Simone de Beauvoir's novel "Glossy Pictures" is a confessional story of a woman who is looking for the real in herself, in the world, in her close surroundings. Her life has turned into glossy pictures from advertisements, and in her soul there is emptiness. Why did she forget how to feel alive? What does she lack in order to be happy? Happiness is like a meaning, like a choice, like the highest manifestation of life. "No," she screams with all her might, "no! Just not Catherine. I will not allow her to be made into the same thing they did to me. And what have they done to me? A woman who loves no one, insensitive to the beauty of the world, unable even to cry..." But she is resolute, because she sees: "somewhere in eternity she must circle around herself, and I must look at her. I didn’t want to go back: to become a young woman again, traveling in the company of her father, I didn’t want her to one day become like her mother, and no one would even remember how she was this charming maenad.” She has a choice.