Park Suki began her literary career in 1995, winning the Hankook Ilbo New Year's Literary Contest. She has published numerous works, including the novels Cheerful Madness, In Search of a Kiss, The Selfish Gene, Sartre Needed Three Women, and I’m Not Ready to Go Home Yet. She has also released an art essay titled You Are an Artist. Since her first exhibition in 2014, she has held ten solo exhibitions and is active as a painter.

This novel is a reimagining of the love that shaped the life of Sartre, a 20th-century intellectual giant, philosopher, novelist, and critic, whose thoughts guided people around the world. Through the eyes of his lover, Dolores, the novel explores Sartre’s love and quest for freedom through his relationships with three women: his lifelong companion and necessary love, Simone de Beauvoir; the symbol of youth, Olga; and Dolores herself, as the pursuit of beauty. Sartre’s love was an endless quest for freedom and a constant choice.
In Sartre Needed Three Women, Park Suki contrasts ordinary, conventional love with idealized, conceptual love, dealing with the theme of love's loss and recovery. The protagonist is Dolores Vanetti, an American woman who became Sartre’s lover and confidant from 1945 for the next five years. Sartre met her in January 1945 while stationed in the United States as a correspondent for the Combat newspaper at Albert Camus' request. He declared her his greatest lover since Beauvoir and passionately professed his love for her.
Their love lasted for five years. But when Dolores settled in Paris and realized Sartre could not give her the time she deserved due to his commitments to Beauvoir and another lover, she felt humiliated and ended the relationship.
The novel begins when Dolores arrives in Paris to start her life with Sartre. She soon realizes the reality of her relationship as she meets Sartre’s circle of friends and discovers the truth about his love life. Believing she was Sartre’s one and only, she is shocked to learn that Sartre always needed three women in his life.
Dolores's view of love is portrayed as deeply traditional and ordinary, seeking to find fulfillment and stability in a passionate, unified relationship. On the other hand, Sartre’s idealistic and conceptual love is shown as a contradiction, a world full of lies. This unfulfilled love demands Dolores to make difficult decisions about her life.
Author’s Note
When it comes to Sartre's love story, Simone de Beauvoir is likely the first person that comes to mind. But I found little interest in the love between them, which everyone knows about. Despite the somewhat unconventional idea of a marriage contract, their love seemed too textbook-like for me.
Instead, I wanted to write about a lesser-known love story of Sartre, and in my research, I stumbled upon a woman named Dolores Vanetti. Something about her sparked my imagination. Of all the various types of love Sartre experienced, his love with Dolores seemed the closest to ordinary and conventional love, which intrigued me.
Whether a love that involves reason or ideology is true love, I don’t know. But I do know that such love lacks honesty. Even if Sartre and Dolores’s love wasn’t ideal, no one can deny its honesty. So I dared to imagine: “Despite all his romantic entanglements, could it be that Dolores Vanetti was the one who truly made Sartre experience love?”
For these reasons, Dolores Vanetti became the protagonist and narrator of my novel. She was the one woman who made Simone de Beauvoir feel most threatened by Sartre’s affections.
The records of their love, which began when they met in 1945 and ended in 1950, are only briefly mentioned in Sartre’s biographies. Therefore, this novel, while based on some historical facts, is largely a work of fiction.