If you want to be well supplied with reading for the winter,here is someone who wrote both novels and the famous book,The Second Sex.You probably already know de Beauvoir was the partner of Jean Paul Sartre though it was an open relationship.Despite her saying she wanted freedom I suspect she was not totally happy with that situation and also had many abortions….such a choice is not one most women would make.Here is an interview with her in the Paris Review
But I just want to introduce her novels here.And thisis for a gneral reader,not an academic.
The most ambitious is “The Mandarins“.It is very much based on her own life and caused much pain to her ex lover Nelson Algren,the writer.You will get a very good idea of post war intellectual life in Paris amongst the founders of
Existentialism .And there are many portraits of those people and their relationships.My probelns with this novel is
It looks like a novel
It feels like a novel
It’s written like a novel
But does it come alive?
For me it is too cerebral and there is little /contribution from or openness to the Imagination.I feel it was written by will power and not by the head and heart.Everything is a little detached,a little cold
On the other hand where is all that commitment now in our political/cultural life?
How my heart sings 
Yes,I feel the same..I have read that book more than once for the history and to know how these people lived,but I do feel she was more dominated by Sartre’s wishes than women in a conventional marriage may be.
As I said,the books never come alive for me but they are worth reading
I agree with your critique of her book. Actually, I have many reservations about some of her ideas too. But it isn’t important for me to agree with a writer in order to appreciate him or her. However, in de Beauvoir’s case, I find that the writing isn’t all that impressive… but it is interesting.
I liked The Mandarins bit it does not flow.It has a wooden quality.A forcedness.Bit she is to be admired