Beauvoir's thinking rarely strayed far from the experience of adolescence and its legacies for freedom, either in her literary stories or her philosophical works. And even though her position evolved over time, she saw adolescence as a foundational, highly significant and demanding encounter with the politics of our freedom. She argues that adolescence is the first thought and felt experience of ambiguity, ‘between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet’. At first, she extends this living experience to all ‘fellow men’ (EA 6), but later, in the second volume of The Second Sex, Beauvoir becomes more attentive to sexual difference, outlining various situations of girlhood development. Beauvoir's framing of adolescence as political and ambiguous living experience guides my analysis of Debra Granik's film Leave No Trace (2018), where I argue that Granik's cinematic consideration of adolescence, resonant of Beauvoir's many phenomenological reflections, presents a productive, political comment on feminine becoming in the twenty-first century. Granik and Beauvoir appear to have a lot in common. For both, ambiguity forms the foundation of human experience, shedding light on ethical and political aspects of lived experience. As a cornerstone of their respective projects (for Granik, this is seen through her films; for Beauvoir, it is her essays, novels and plays), each uses the textures and nuances of their creative expression to foreground the phenomenological impact of oppressive situations, drawing specific attention to individual situations in order to examine the consequences for society at large.

Beauvoir's thinking on adolescence is peppered throughout her immense body of work, often informing or supporting her more substantial discussions on philosophies of freedom and action in our relations with others. It is widely known that Beauvoir, like other existentialist phenomenologists, did not regard psychoanalysis favourably (TSS 49–68), and yet most of the criticism is set against the classical (that is, Freudian) psychoanalytic model that relegated women's desire to the margins. As I discussed in Chapter 2, fundamental to existentialism is the notion of choice, and because psychoanalysis ‘systematically refuse[s] the idea of choice and its corollary, the notion of value’ (TSS 55), Beauvoir saw it as not offering a convincing method of freedom.