Eugene Ionesco (1910-1994), a Romanian-born Frenchman, was central to the theatre of the Absurd, a dramatic movement that abandons logical plot development, meaningful dialogue, and intelligible characters, and instead embraces anarchic comedy to convey the meaninglessness of modern man's existence in a universe ruled by chance. Ionesco's many works include: plays like The Bald Soprano, The Chairs, The Killer, Exit the King, and more than two dozen others theatre criticism (collected in Notes and Counter Notes) and this memoir, which critics have compared in spirit and vision to Pascal's Pensées, Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and Kafka's diaries.