Thirteen Ways of Looking at a French Woman J. Courtney Sullivan I. 1987 It begins, like all things, with my mother. In our suburban Massachusetts neighborhood, full of Irish Catholics who throw block parties and summer cookouts, she believes that, in her heart, she is French. She collects Quimper pottery, wears silk scarves with the confidence of a native Parisian, and spritzes Chanel N5 on the dog after a bath. Her passion is inherited from her own mother, my grandmother, who to me seems every bit as glamorous as Catherine Deneuve. She subscribes to W, and when she's collected enough back issues, she bags them up and brings them over to our house. My grandmother is known for being the first person ever to jog in her neighborhood, long before there was such a thing as jogging attire-she did it in a trench coat. She goes into the city to get her hair done at a proper salon that costs a fortune instead of at some underwhelming beauty parlor closer to home. She, too, believes that French women are superior to us, not that she knows any French women. Her portals to that world are fashion magazines and Julia Child, whom she watches religiously on television, absorbing Child's thoughts on butter and wine, filling notebooks with her recipes. Notebooks we will find and cherish after my grandmother is gone. II. 1996 In high school French class, we watch the movies Red, White, and Blue, Kielowski's Three Colors trilogy. On my own, I watch Before Sunrise approximately ninety-seven times. I want to be Juliette Binoche and Julie Delpy in equal measure, even though they are nothing alike. They are both French. Seemingly effortless in their beauty. Strong and commanding and flawlessly dressed, even at life's most depressing moments. I have that sense that if I just study them enough, I might become them through osmosis. I am fifteen. Nothing my mother does could possibly please me. But I realize that on this one point, she was correct: French women are spectacular in every way. I love the language. I love my French teacher, who tells us one day, "Joy is happiness with no strings attached." Later, when almost all my French is forgotten, I will remember this. III. 2001 I announce that I plan to take a year off from college, horrifying my mother. I want to write and see the world. I would love to spend the year in France, but I don't have the guts, or the confidence for the language. I am twenty and I have never been outside the United States. As if to put a fine point on my naivetZ, I declare that I will either move to London, or to Orlando, Florida, where I'll be employed at Disney World as part of a student work program. The program offers all kinds of positions. Some people even get to dress up as characters, perform in shows. I apply and am granted the job of fry cook. And so I choose London, where I work first as an intern at a literary agency, and later as a nanny for a family with three boys under the age of two. I tell my friend Kirsty at the agency about my love of Paris, my urge to go. She says she knows Americans are crazy about it, but the place doesn't hold such allure for the English. Paris is for quick weekend jaunts, bachelorette parties, that sort of thing. One long weekend, I finally go, and stay with a friend who is studying abroad there. We last saw each other at our casual college in the middle of nowhere, a place where pajama pants were considered appropriate dinner attire. But now I find that the city and all its glamor have made an impact on her. She is living as a lodger in the home of a Parisian book editor in the 16th arrondissement. She skips lunch each day and saves up to buy a Louis Vuitton clutch instead. (Though she confesses that once, in a fit of homesickness, she devoured a Big Mac. When she tells the story, she does not call McDonald's "McDonald's." She calls it, in perfectly accented French, McDo. Somehow even fast food seems more glamorous here.) This is it. At last. The Paris the women of my family have been dreaming about forever. I am the first of us to reach it. I get my picture taken in front of the Eiffel Tower but to my surprise I can't manage to feel much for it. I have seen too many pictures, maybe, imagined it too many times. I had a stronger reaction to Brussels a month before, perhaps because I never had a single expectation for Brussels. My friend and I rush through the Louvre and Pre Lachaise like commuters at Penn Station. She is a generous host, but she has seen all this already. What she really wants to do is what everyone our age in every city wants to do-go out, get drunk, meet boys. Who am I to argue? I watch French women on the train, in the shops, sitting outside at sidewalk cafZs. It is true, what I've always believed about their beauty, their style. It's a code I want to crack, though I don't actually converse with a single French person, except for a passing hello to the book editor, and a boy I kiss at a bar, also more or less in passing. The next morning, as I board the Eurostar back to London, a text message appears: I kiss you, I love you, I remember you all my life. It is ridiculous, over-the-top. A cartoon of what a Frenchman might say. I keep it like a souvenir until the phone is lost. IV. 2004 After graduation, I move to New York to become a writer. My first job is as an assistant at a beauty magazine, where I am a total fish out of water. But I find that everyone in this world worships French women as much as I do. I interview photographers and stylists. Their inspirations for looks are always French women from several decades ago. Brigitte Bardot, Anouk AimZe. Between student loan debt and the rent on a shared shoe-box apartment, I am well aware that I'm too poor to even think about visiting Paris again any time soon. I go there in books. Books I really like, like Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon. Books I love, like Diane Johnson's Le Divorce. Silly books about beauty secrets that I take from the communal shelf at work after everyone else has gone home. Chief among them: French Women Don't Get Fat. I don't read this as a guide, hoping to become the things I find in its pages. I read it like I am Margaret Mead watching the Samoans, or an alien just landing on planet Earth and taking a look around. I have nothing in common with the women described in the book, much as I admire them. I wear Nikes to the office. Not even ballet flats. I am an impossibly bad dresser. Though I spend my days writing about makeup, I don't really know how to apply it. I have, in fact, gotten a little bit fat. V. 2007 I get a job at the New York Times, doing research for an opinion columnist. I start writing for the paper, too. On the weekends, I work on my novel. The tools I use during the week seep into my fiction. I like to create a character not from nothing, but by building the emotions and the unknowable on top of what can be known. I want to get the details just right. So when I write a worm farmer, I interview worm farmers. Dollhouse aficionados and paramedics get the same treatment. It is a total thrill, getting to peer into other people's worlds. The best part of the job. VI. 2010 My first novel, Commencement, is published. One day I get an e-mail from an editor in Paris named Marie. She wants to know if her small publishing house can have the French rights to the book. There are agents to consult at moments like this. Negotiations to be made. But picture it: My book in French. I reply right away. Yes, of course Marie can have the rights. VII. 2010 Nearly a decade after my first trip to Paris, I get to go back. My boyfriend Kevin and I are house-sitting for friends in London, and we make a quick three-night detour to the City of Light. This time, I am determined to do it right. To see everything important, all the sights. A year earlier, my mother finally got her chance to go. I ask her for travel tips and we copy her itinerary more or less to the letter. She warns us not to try to do everything. Enjoy it, move at a leisurely pace. But instead, we try to do everything. As with that first glimpse of the Eiffel Tower years earlier, we find that there is far less joy in the expected attractions than there is in the surprises-our hotel in the Latin Quarter, built on the remains of a thirteenth-century abbey; a party we stumble upon in the grand courtyard of an art school, the students dancing and singing and showcasing their work. But some of the expected places are incredible too. Versailles astonishes me. I could stay at the piano bar at the H(tm)tel de Crillon for weeks. I think of how beauty is such an important part of everyday life in Paris in a way it is not in New York, as we sit in the Luxembourg Gardens and watch children eating ice cream carved into the shape of flowers. We are, decidedly, tourists. As evidenced by the thick blue-and-yellow copy of Rick Steves Paris that we carry everywhere we go. A few times a day, I glimpse someone else carrying this book, and we smile bashfully at each other, found out. The taxi drivers can't understand my attempts at French. They switch to English seconds after I open my mouth. I am kind of relieved getting back to London, a city that has never seemed intimidating to me. VIII. 2012 Commencement is released in France and becomes a bestseller there. In French, it is called Les Debutantes. I am beginning a new novel, my third, called The Engagements. From the start, I know that one of the main characters will be a glamorous Parisian woman. A woman I will never be, but have always admired from afar. I begin by interviewing Parisian transplants to Boston and New York. I ask them everything. One of the things I cherish most about being a writer is this: If you were just to say to a person, "Tell me everything about yourself," they might balk. But if you say, "I am a writer, tell me so that I can make a story from it," they will almost always do it. The women I talk to make excellent subjects because they've lived in both worlds. I decide my character will be the same. A Parisian transplant to New York, so that I can see what my own city looks like through her eyes. I give her a name. Delphine. My interview subjects mention the small irritations of American life-too much air-conditioning, the ubiquity of Starbucks. And big ones, too-how strangers cling to false familiarity, making promises to get together again, but never keeping them. Helicopter parents. The gym-obsessed. The way, at dinner parties, people tend to pair off and talk to only one person instead of having a lively group discussion. The things they miss most include good bread, Avene Hydrance Optimale face cream. French Elle. Paris Match. I learn that in their kitchens in Paris, there are always cubes instead of grains in the sugar bowl. That pastis is never kept in the fridge. That as a term of endearment, one's mother might call one mon tourterelle, "my turtledove." They tell me that in Paris, if you meet someone for coffee but don't feel like the caffeine, you might order a citron pressZ-lemonade. They tell me of a French wedding tradition in which a bride and groom hide in a broom closet, waiting to be found by their guests. I want to know Delphine's Paris. It seems only responsible to return there for research. Kevin comes with me again. We are recently engaged. I know exactly where I want to go-Montmartre and the rue Cler, the two neighborhoods I have decided will be most important to Delphine. Through a company called Paris Walks, I hire a private guide, Brad, who takes us around Montmartre, where he lives. I have been before, but now I notice new things. A luthier's shop with violins hanging in the window. A small vineyard that was tended by Benedictine monks in the twelfth century. The old tabacs turned late-night grocery stores run by North African immigrants. The astonishing view of Paris from the outdoor tables at Chez Pommette. The artist studios built high up in the garrets of old houses, where the light is best. An ivy-covered brick house on rue Cauchois, with tall white shutters and bright red geraniums in the window boxes. Before, in Paris, I was always self-conscious. Did I sound like a stupid American? Was my accent atrocious? But in the role of writer, I'm too curious to care. Kevin and I go to hear a violin soloist play in the fglise de Saint-Germain-des-PrZs. We stumble upon a summer carnival at the edge of the Tuileries Gardens late one night-at picnic tables, people eat crpes and cotton candy, and drink wine. Children jump on trampolines and scream with mock terror on the rides. On a Sunday morning, we go to a bustling outdoor market beneath the elevated train tracks on the boulevard de Grenelle. Fruit merchants sell enormous tomatoes and eggplant, ripe cherries, artichokes, seven different kinds of mushrooms. One stall has thirty kinds of olives in wooden bins, and any herb or nut you could imagine. There are men selling fish and meat, all of it displayed beautifully, presentation as important as quality. At a fromagerie, a father-daughter pair offers two dozen wheels of cheese, which they slice and wrap in pale blue paper. Flower stalls burst with roses and calla lilies. I eat three tiny beignets while I watch old ladies do their shopping for the week. This is the trip on which I fall in love with Paris. Not Paris as I'd imagined it, but Paris as it is. IX. 2012 I write all of Delphine's chapters in a small guest bedroom at Kevin's mother's house in Des Moines, Iowa. It's about as un-Parisian a setting as you can get, but the memories are fresh and I can transport myself there in an instant. Excerpted from A Paris All Your Own: Bestselling Women Writers on the City of Light All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
