Lessons in French
What can you tell us about your new book Lessons in French?
LESSONS IN FRENCH is at once a love letter to Paris and the story of a young woman finding herself, her true family, and her moral compass in the tall shadow of a powerful boss. It is, in many senses, a classic coming of age story, but with a distinctly Parisian twist.
It’s 1989, the Berlin Wall is coming down, and Kate has just graduated from Yale, eager to pursue her dreams as a fledgling painter. When she receives a job offer to work as the assistant to Lydia Schell, a famous American photographer in Paris, she immediately accepts. It’s a chance not only to be at the centre of it all, but also to return to France for the first time since she was a lonely 9-year-old girl, sent to the outskirts of Paris to live with cousins while her father was dying.
Kate may speak fluent French, but she arrives at the Schell household in the fashionable Sixth Arrondissement both dazzled and wildly impressionable. She finds herself surrounded by a seductive cast of characters, including the bright, pretentious Schells, with whom she boards, and their assortment of famous friends; Kate’s own flamboyant cousin; a fellow Yalie who seems to have it all figured out; and a bande of independently wealthy young men with royal lineage. As Kate rediscovers Paris and her roots there, while trying to fit into Lydia's glamorous and complicated family, she begins to question the kindness of the people to whom she is so drawn as well as her own motives for wanting them to love her.
With insight from my own youthful experience in Paris, I draw a portrait of a precocious, ambitious young woman struggling to define herself in a vibrant world that spirals out of her control. I hope that her journey resonates across the Channel.
Why did you decide to set the book in 1989?
I set the book in 1989-90 for two reasons.
First of all, it was an incredible historical moment. One of the overriding metaphors in LESSONS IN FRENCH is the fall of the Berlin Wall. It’s about a huge barrier coming down, the before and the after. Suddenly, two peoples who had been living side by side, invisible to one another, were face to face. In my novel, not only is the Berlin Wall itself a leitmotif, but there are many moments when my Kate is suddenly face to face with the unimaginable. 1989 was the beginning of consciousness of a full-blown AIDS epidemic and of the Salman Rushdie Fatwa and all that it foretold. It was a heady and unnerving time, both in European history and in the life of my heroine.
Secondly, 1989-90 was one of the last periods in which going to another country actually meant going away. It was just before the internet, before cell phones. Phone calls were prohibitively expensive. You lived for letters. You couldn’t text your mother every time you had a croissant. If you went to a foreign city to have an experience, you didn’t keep in constant touch with home and a web of friends all over the world. You were truly immersed. And I wanted LESSONS IN FRENCH to be a total Paris immersion.
What made you want to set the book in Paris?
I spent my own first year out of university in Paris, had a very rich and confusing relationship with a mentor, made a lot of mistakes and hopefully learned from them, although not nearly as well as me heroine! So Paris is the backdrop of my own coming of age, and I can still visualize it perfectly in that time. I can see the streets, the parks, the churches, the cafes, the metro tickets, the clubs, the impossibly elegant women, the cigarette smoke wafting everywhere, the windows of the boulangeries... Paris is the perfect city in which to set a novel about coming into one’s own because it is so sensual, beautiful and sexy. And I love French food, as does Kate, and could not resist the chance to describe it. One of the best compliments the book has received is that it makes readers hungry for Paris.
This is your debut novel so do you have plans for another?
I do indeed! There is a powerful father-daughter theme running through my work. I had a symbiotic relationship with my own father, who lost his voice to throat cancer before I was born. I spoke aloud for him, “translating” his words to the outside world. While the father character in LESSONS IN FRENCH is not drawn from my own, the closeness and sense of loss are, I hope, very true to life. In my current novel for HarperCollins UK, I am writing about a father and daughter in 1970’s Hollywood, trying to sell a Western screenplay that they have written together. It’s called BORRASCA, which means the opposite of “bonanza,” and it’s a bit of a tragicomic caper.
You have a PhD in French Literature, so how much has this influenced your first book?
I specialized in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and Proust’s IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME is probably the novel I have thought about most in my life. I feel that the way he links nostalgia to sensuality is sheer brilliance and, without ever comparing myself to Proust, I try to riff off his perception in my own small way. I also love the nineteenth century French novels by Balzac and Flaubert about provincials coming to Paris and reinventing themselves, learning the social codes and dances and styles of dress. I thought about Balzac’s characters a lot when I was writing Kate as she made her way in Paris.
You must have read a lot for your PhD, so who are your favourite reads?
I love Flaubert’s MADAME BOVARY and A SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION. I also was mesmerized by Stendhal’s THE RED AND THE BLACK. The novels and poetry of Victor Hugo are fantastic. I wrote my dissertation on Mallarme and Baudelaire. But I also like the 18th Century. Rousseau’s CONFESSIONS are amazing, completely crazy and genius and I think very important for novelists. I’m afraid I could go on and on, but one more recent writer I would like to mention is Marguerite Yourcenar. Her historical novels are the most vivid I have ever read, totally pleasurable and inspiring.
What is your advice for aspiring writers?
I would say that if you have an experience you believe is worthy of fiction, spend some time figuring out the emotional truth of that experience. Stick to that truth, all the while giving yourself complete freedom of imagination with the story and the characters. LESSONS IN FRENCH grew from a nugget of emotional truth in my life into a full-fledged novel because I pared down the emotions and then allowed them to grow into a satisfying story.
What is your writing process?
I am not a wildly efficient writer. I have writer friends, mostly in the young adult world. who are capable of turning out hundreds of rough pages in a few weeks and then going back and revising them, so that that they lay out the entire story very quickly. I admire this technique but I’m afraid that, while I have the broad strokes of the story in my head and often outline them, I have to move slowly and sequentially through my scenes and get each one into nearly final form before I move onto the next. For me, form is so intricately connected with function that I cannot see my way forward until I feel my sentences and scenes are well-crafted.
What is the most appealing thing for you about living and studying in France?
Because I lived in France as a child and speak French, there is something wonderfully stimulating about living in two languages and feeling the currents of two cultures. The dance between my French self and my American self keeps me very much on my toes. I find that combining the French and American educational traditions has made studying in France very rich. The French tend to be more didactic than we are. They impart their culture in a beautiful but rigid way, and probably have a greater amount of general knowledge than Americans. But they don’t have our tradition of questioning and self-expression. No one asks a French student what they think - they tell them what is true. This is both refreshing and stifling. I think there is a balance to be found between the French utter respect for culture and the American compulsion for self-expression. For me, studying in Paris and seeking that balance has been a great experience.
What is next for you?
As I mentioned, I am working on my father-daughter novel, BORRASCA, set in Hollywood in the 1970’s, and, fingers crossed, I hope to be involved in the film adaptation of LESSONS IN FRENCH, which is being optioned as we speak.