Becoming a « memoir writer » partly due to the impact of her writing gesture on her life, while renewing the characteristics of the genre, the female author of The Prime of Life and Force of Circumstance embodies, in the eyes of the opinion and of posterity, that identity which relies upon the memorable linking a life to its time. In order to grasp the scope of this memorial design in a better way, we will endeavour to differentiate the Beauvoirian prospect from the writings of the self in Sartre, as well as from the essential formula of « force of circumstance » that circulates at the time between Malraux, Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, and to which the female memoir writer confers a distinctive range.