We are fortunate in Ionesco’s life to have received many of his own writings, including journals and a memoir, that allow us to see his life from his own point of view. These sources, though biased, give us an insight into a man whose writing is “fundamentally about the difficulty of comprehending anyone, not least oneself.” Eugene Ionesco was born in Slatina, Romania in 1909, to a French mother and Romanian father. He was the oldest of three children and he witnessed his younger brother’s death at a very young age, which may have contributed to his fascination with death. Two years after his birth his family moved to Paris, where he spent the next 11 years of his life before returning to Romania to live with his father in 1922. These were quarrelsome years for his parents and he writes about his memories of their sometime violent fights often in his journals. One of their fights ended in his mother attempting to take poison and this solidified for Ionesco the idea that happiness was impossible.

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Ionesco was very close with his mother and this relationship is explored often in his plays. Ionesco’s life is also colored by the experience of his existence as a pendulum swinging from emotional extreme to extreme. His period of the most happiness occurred from 1917-1919 when he journeyed to a farm in rural France. Here he was able to escape the burdens of the war and his mother’s life and experience country life.Ionesco’s relationship with his father he often described as strained and negative. His father had returned to Romania to fight in the war and Ionesco’s mother had worked in a factory to support the family assuming that her husband had died. This caused Ionesco to live in a children’s home outside of Paris for a few months, another experience he wrote about in his journals. Ionesco was only reunited with his father when he was 13 years old. His father had supported the fascist party in World War II and embraced communism in its rise to power in the postwar period in Romania. This paternal tyrant figure is explored often his Ionesco’s works.

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Ionesco, remaining in Romania, attended the University of Bucharest to study French. In 1936 he married Rodica Burileanu, whom he had met in school, and in the same year his mother died. At this time he was teaching French in Romania in secondary schools. After two years as a teacher he returned to Paris with his wife. His only daughter was born in 1944. At this time he worked as a proofreader and studied English from conversation books prompting him to write his first play, The Bald Soprano. This began his prolific career as a playwright at the age of 36.

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His most successful years were the 1960s. He began to explore new territory in drama and was creating his own voice. His original “antiplay” was being developed into more complex stories that were at time autobiographical and at times political. In the late 1950s and 1960s Ionesco was a part of the “London controversy,” a debate between himself and London drama critic, Kenneth Tynan who had originally supported Ionesco but due to shifting political views began to find his work meaningless. His success began to decline in this period but in 1970 he was elected to the Academie Française.  He continued to write and explore the questions of humanity and life that haunted him until his death in 1994 in Paris. All he had wanted in life was to overcome death and he had finally succumbed.