Paris in Love: A Memoir

By Eloisa James

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the author of Wilde in Love, a joyful chronicle of a year in one of the most beautiful cities in the world: Paris.

“What a beautiful and delightful tasting menu of a book: the kids, the plump little dog, the Italian husband. Reading this memoir was like wandering through a Parisian patisserie in a dream. I absolutely loved it.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

When bestselling romance author Eloisa James took a sabbatical from her day job as a Shakespeare professor, she also took a leap that many people dream about: She sold her house and moved her family to Paris.

With no classes to teach, no committee meetings to attend, no lawn to mow or cars to park, Eloisa revels in the ordinary pleasures of life—discovering corner museums that tourists overlook, chronicling Frenchwomen’s sartorial triumphs, walking from one end of Paris to another. She copes with her Italian husband’s notions of quality time; her two hilarious children, ages eleven and fifteen, as they navigate schools—not to mention puberty—in a foreign language; and her mother-in-law Marina’s raised eyebrow in the kitchen (even as Marina overfeeds Milo, the family dog).

Paris in Love invites the reader into the life of a New York Times bestselling author and her spirited, enchanting family, framed by la ville de l’amour.

Praise for Paris in Love

“Exhilarating and enchanting . . . brims with a casual wisdom about life.”—Chicago Tribune

“In this delightful charm-bracelet of a memoir, [Eloisa James shares] her adventures as an American suddenly immersed in all things French—food, clothes, joie de vivre.”—People

“Enchanting . . . gives the reader a sense of being immersed along with James in Paris for a year . . . you see the rain, taste the food, observe the people.”—USA Today

“This delectable confection, which includes recipes, is more than a visit to a glorious city: it is also a tour of a family, a marriage, and a love that has no borders. Très magnifique!”—Library Journal (starred review)

“A charming, funny and poignant memoir . . . steeped in Paris and suffused with love.”—Star Tribune

“Charming . . . a romance—for a city, a life, a family, and love itself.”—The Huffington Post

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 3, 2012
• ISBN: 9780679604440

Eloisa James

Eloisa James is a USA Today and New York Times bestselling author and professor of English literature, who lives with her family in New York, but can sometimes be found in Paris or Italy. She is the mother of two and, in a particularly delicious irony for a romance writer, is married to a genuine Italian knight.

Book preview

AN INTRODUCTION TO

LA VIE PARISIENNE

In December 2007, my mother died of cancer; two weeks later I was diagnosed with the same disease.

I’ve always been an obsessive reader of memoirs, particularly those that revolve around terrible diseases. While gawking at car accidents gives you a toe-curling sense of shame, perusing a memoir about multiple sclerosis, for example, has an air of virtue—as if by reading about other people’s tragedies, you are gathering intelligence about your own possible future. Having read at least ten cancer memoirs before my diagnosis, I was quite sure about what would happen next.

I immediately started anticipating the epiphany when I would be struck by the acute beauty of life. I would see joy in my children’s eyes (rather than stark rebellion), eschew caffeine, and simply be, preferably while doing yoga in front of a sunset. My better, less irritable self would come out of hiding, and I would stop wasting time at the computer and sniping at my husband.

I have cancer … but the good news is that I will learn to live in the moment.

Or perhaps not.

When the Life-Is-Precious response didn’t immediately appear, I delayed making joy my modus vivendi while I looked for a doctor. My mother had demanded that her surgeon give her at least enough time to finish her novel-in-progress, and her surgeon had delivered. Mom had the copyedits right there in the hospice with her. I couldn’t concentrate on joy when I was obsessively trying to figure out which breast specialist would give me the time I wanted—about forty more years. Maybe fifty.

My sister, Bridget, who is science-minded and capable of retaining unpleasant medical facts, accompanied me on the quest for the right oncologist. We first saw a fierce woman on Madison Avenue who had decorated her office with Wonder Woman dolls. I took this as a sign of somewhat juvenile (but welcome) joie de vivre, but Bridget deemed it too self-congratulatory. Dr. Wonder Woman was ready to battle tremendous odds; her eyes shone with a true-believer fervor as she prescribed removing various parts of my body and radiating much of what was left. She wrestled me onto a cot and drew blood for a gene test right there in her office. Don’t worry about your insurance, she said blithely. After they hear your family history, they’ll pay up.

Once I learned that I didn’t have the BRAC gene, the one that brands you with a big red C for cancer, I couldn’t get myself to go back to her office. For BRAC carriers, Dr. Wonder Woman offered a scorched-earth policy and the zeal to Fight the Good Fight. I had started sleeping better once I decided that my early-stage case was like herpes, another disease I’d read about and hoped to avoid: disagreeable, but hardly terminal.

Eventually Bridget and I found a calm, quiet oncologist who recommended radiation and hormone treatment, but also noted the salient fact that my breast was the culprit. I stopped thinking about herpes. This was a part of my body that I could live without. In rapid order, I lost that breast.

But having escaped chemotherapy and radiation, did I have the right to call myself a survivor, especially when my newly reconstructed breast turned out to be so pneumatic and round? I decided the answer was no, explaining my lack of epiphany and my disinclination to watch the sun rise from a downward dog position. No pink ribbon for me. Obviously, my diagnosis just wasn’t serious enough to change my personality.

Lucky me. I had a better profile but the same old psyche.

And then, without consciously deciding to, I began to shed my possessions. I started with my books. Since I was seven, I had compulsively collected novels, cataloging them and keeping my favorites close to the door in case of fire. My boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia bore a large sign instructing my parents not to forget it as they carried my (presumably unconscious) body through the door, just before the ceiling fell in.

Now, though, I started giving away books with abandon. My husband, Alessandro, had weathered my bout with cancer with considerably more aplomb than he did its aftermath. As I purged my own belongings, I proselytized the same, but to no effect. Alessandro was flatly uninterested, as anyone might have guessed from the neatly labeled boxes in our attic containing every exam he’d given since 1988. I sometimes worried that the floor might buckle from the tons of Italian literature stored under the eaves. The day he discovered three of his books that I had mistakenly placed in a box labeled Goodwill shall not soon be forgotten in our marriage. It was like our honeymoon night, when he set alight an ornamental fire in our room at the bed-and-breakfast and smoked out all the sleepy guests. That blaze is stuck in my memory, and those three books are stuck in his.

But I didn’t stop with books. I did the same with my clothes, jettisoning unopened packages of black stockings from the eighties, the silk nightgown I’d worn on my smoky wedding night, miniskirts in size six. I gave away our wedding presents. My high school term papers hit the recycling bin, followed by college essays and even the children’s artwork, which I had once found endlessly endearing.

For years we had talked of living in Manhattan, in the nostalgic fashion with which my mother used to inform me that she might have been a ballerina, if only I had not come along. Alessandro had grown up in an apartment in the center of Florence; he hankered after narrow alleys and the noise of recycling trucks smashing wine bottles at 4:00 A.M. But I grew up on a farm, and when we moved to the East Coast, I had insisted that we live in the suburbs, even though I would be teaching in the city. I thought that parenthood entailed a backyard, a tree, and the sacrifice of urban delights.

So we had settled into a charming house in New Jersey, with a backyard, a mock pear tree, two studies, and forty bookcases. But now, all these years later, lying on the couch recuperating from my surgery, I realized that I had no close friends nearby who might stop in and bring me tea. The people I loved were New Yorkers who braved the bridge and tunnel to bring me certificates for day spas—in the city.

We found a realtor.

Staring out the living room window at that mock pear tree, I also discovered a keen desire to surprise myself. Rather than living my life in the moment, I wanted to live someone else’s life—specifically, that of a person who lived in Paris. Being a professor has many drawbacks (such as a minuscule salary), but having no time off is not one of them. We could each take a sabbatical year; we simply needed to renew our passports. Once Alessandro found that there was an Italian school in Paris that our bilingual children could attend, I turned my back on the pear tree and bought new drapes for the windows. I filled the empty spots in the denuded bookshelves with pink vases. The house sold in five days, during the worst real estate market in decades. Our cars were last to go.

Luca and Anna, the younger members of our family, were less than enthralled, to say the least, at the prospect of decamping to France. They were particularly struck by the fact that, of all of us, only Alessandro spoke French. (Although they had received good grades for three years in French class, they were right: they couldn’t speak the language.) I informed my disbelieving children that inability to understand our neighbors would make their experience more gripping. Threatened with insubordination, I pointed out that I, too, had loathed my parents at their age; instigating fear and mutiny in one’s offspring is a parental duty.

Friends were kissed goodbye, Facebooking promises were made, toys were packed. Large amounts of logo-emblazoned clothing were purchased, since a savvy friend promised us that a prominent display of American brands would ensure popularity in the Leonardo da Vinci School.

Paris awaited: a whole year with no teaching and no departmental responsibilities, just la vie Parisienne.

In August we moved to an apartment on rue du Conservatoire, a two-block-long street most notable for the music that floats, on warm afternoons, from the open windows of the conservatory. We found ourselves in the 9th arrondissement, in a quartier that is home to various immigrant populations, the Folies Bergère, and more Japanese restaurants than I have fingers.

I had made grand plans to write four books while in Paris: a scholarly book about Jacobean boys’ drama in 1607, a couple of romance novels, and a historical novel. But in spite of these inestimable ambitions, I found myself walking for hours. I read books in bed while rain hit the window. Sometimes I spent two weeks doing one Sunday New York Times crossword, toiling every night to solve a clue that likely took Will Shortz two seconds to solve.

Soon enough, I discovered an interesting fact: if a writer doesn’t put in hours at the keyboard every day, no writing gets done. I had always suspected this was true, but having grown up in a family of writers (and a family without a television at that), I never had the chance to test it out. Even during an inglorious, nonacademic spell after college, I returned home after work to plug away at a novel. Remember, my mother sat in her hospice bed correcting copyedits. Leisure didn’t seem to be part of my DNA.

Yet virtually the only writing I did was on Facebook, where I created something of an online chronicle, mirroring it in even more concise form on Twitter. As each day passed, my thumbnail entries fell off the bottom of my Facebook page, relegated to Older Posts. My tweets evaporated, as ephemeral and trivial, as sweet and heedless, as our days in Paris.

A selection of these posts—organized, revised, a few expanded into short essays—has become this book. For the most part, I have retained the short form, the small explosion of experience, as it best gives the flavor of my days.

Those days were organized not around to-do lists and book deadlines but around walks in the park and visits to the fishmonger. Deadlines came and went without a catastrophic blow to my publishing career; I relaxed into a life free of both students and committee work; laziness ceased to be a frightening word.

I never did learn how to live in the moment, but I did learn that moments could be wasted and the world would continue to spin on its axis.

It was a glorious lesson.

A PARISIAN FALL

We spent the summer in Italy, then rented a car and drove to Paris. I pictured this drive as the proverbial quality time, a charming entrée to a year of creative freedom. But in fact, the children took it as a chance to catch up on missed television, now endlessly available thanks to the Internet. Look, kids, I shouted from the front seat. There’s a glorious château off to our right! The only response was wild laughter inspired by Family Guy riffs on Ronald Reagan. They weren’t even alive for his presidency.

Last night we stayed with friends who own a kiwi orchard in Cigliano, in northern Italy, a misty, dim forest with rows of female trees, heavy with fruit, interspersed with fruitless males. The farmhouse had hooks over the beds to hang drying herbs and sausages. Showing no respect for tradition, Luca freaked out at the meat hooks and begged to be allowed to sleep in the car. We managed to keep from our friends his belief that their beloved house was really a charnel.

Back in the car for the final leg of our journey to Paris, Anna played fart noises on her iPod Touch off and on for hours. I tried to ignore the way my ten-year-old had regressed to half that age and kept my head turned to the window. The French highway was lined with short, vertical pipes from which ferns sprouted. The frilly parts made it look as though the troll dolls from my childhood were hiding in the pipes—perhaps waiting for a chance to hitchhike, if the right family were to happen along.

Our Paris apartment is elegant in the way of a Chanel coat found in an attic trunk: worn around the edges but beautifully designed. The building dates to the 1750s, and the wood floors are all original. The kitchen and bathroom are at the far end of a long corridor that bends around one corner of the building’s courtyard—so that the smells (and the servants) would be isolated.

Our gardienne, it emerged, is not French but Portuguese, with a round face and a bright smile. Alessandro went downstairs with her and was gone for an entire hour; it seems they discussed the price of vegetables the whole time. He reported that store owners on rue Cadet, the shopping street two blocks over, are all thieves. Armed with this knowledge, and dutifully following instructions, we set out for a covered market, Marché Saint-Quentin, where the vegetables are cheaper and the vendors are honorable. We found a dazzling variety of fruit, including four varieties of grapes: small, glistening purple ones, big violet ones, green ones with wild sweetness, and tiny green ones with bitter seeds.

We just spent three hours opening a bank account. I thought our charmingly chatty banker would never stop talking. As he carried on, I felt more and more American. He even gave us a phone number to call for advice diététique. French women must not be universally thin if they need dietary advice from their bank.

There is a small hotel across the street from our building, and another to our right. Halfway down the street is an enormous Gothic church called Saint-Eugène–Sainte-Cécile. I gather that Cecilia is the patron saint of music; the conservatory is right next door. Being in the church is like being inside an enameled treasure box that a demented artisan slaved over for years. Every surface—pillars, walls, ceiling—is covered with ornament, most in different patterns. We gaped until we were shooed out, as Mass was going on. I was a bit humiliated about not understanding a word, thinking it was my defective French, but it turned out to be entirely in Latin. We’re going to try the American Catholic church instead.

In a wild burst of preparation for ninth grade, Luca has just had his lovely Italian curls straightened. Now he looks like a fifteen-year-old French teen, but with an Italian nose.

Today we joined a Rollerblading event: thousands of hip Parisians zipping over a medieval bridge as the sun shone on the Seine. Until I ricocheted off a stranger and flopped on my bottom. A race organizer told me sweetly that "eet eez too difficile." That, as they say, was that. We fell into café chairs and watched Paris stream by as we drank Oranginas. Then we rode back, slowly, practicing our braking.

This morning I saw a chic French woman in the Métro … wearing a beret. How is that possible? I would look unbearably twee, like one of the chipmunks, from Alvin and the Chipmunks doing Singin’ in the Rain.

Anna hates Paris. She hates the move, she hates leaving her friends, she hates her new school, she hates everything. I am the only mother in France dragging a child with her nose in a book down the street, the better not to see anything Parisian.

Our apartment has a sweeping staircase, and stained-glass windows looking into the courtyard—and a tiny, slow elevator added in the 1960s. My husband and I both fit in only by standing side by side and sucking in our tummies. Sometimes the groceries fit, too. The children have to take the stairs. I generally emerge to find Anna lying on the last few steps, gasping, one hand outflung toward the (locked) door, doing a great imitation of dying-man-in-desert-sees-mirage.

The butcher down the street has started flirting with me! It makes me feel as though I’m in a movie. He also gave me a one-euro discount on my sausages. Alessandro’s unromantic assessment is that the butcher is an excellent marketer. Which is true. I am now a customer for life.

Alessandro was born and grew up in Florence, Italy, with a passion for learning languages (English and Latin in high school, French, German, Russian, and ancient Greek thereafter). When I first met him, he had a charming accent that he shed after having been, as he puts it, seduced into domesticity. He’s now a professor of Italian literature at Rutgers University, and was even knighted by the Italian government for obscure intellectual contributions to the republic. At any rate, Alessandro made up his mind not to squander the opportunity to make his French as good as his English, and to that end he’s put a notice on an Internet bulletin board offering to exchange an hour of French conversation for an hour of Italian. He’s being deluged with responses—most of which seem to be treating his offer as an opportunity for a blind date. My personal favorite is from Danielle (but some call me Dasha, your choice), who wrote saying that she had an extra ticket to The Nutcracker, and that they would have a great time speaking French, especially after drinking much champagne.

This morning the Thai restaurant at the bottom of our street exploded, resulting in clouds of white smoke and a terrible smell of burning rubber. The gardienne came up to the fourth floor to tell us that she thought the owners were doing something nefarious in their basement.

The woman who works in the Italian grocery down the street turns out to be from Alessandro’s hometown. Once this interesting fact was established, she took charge of his groceries, removing the olive oil (inferior), switching to buffalo mozzarella (fresher than the kind he’d chosen), and slicing Parma prosciutto rather than San Daniele. It occurs to me that the wily Florentine extracted quite a few more euros from Alessandro’s wallet by claiming kinship, but her creamy, delicate mozzarella is worth every penny.

It’s night, after a day of rain … the windows are open and the strains of a glorious opera pour from the conservatory down the street.

Like any big city, Paris has homeless citizens. But I’ve never before seen a woman carefully sweeping the doorstep where she, her baby, and her husband sleep. Some homeless Parisians have little pup tents and simply flip them open on the street; many have carefully tended cats and dogs on leashes.

Mirabile dictu! Anna has found two things she likes in Paris. The first is chocolate, and the second is the rat

[kwskultety · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Started out funny, then got duller as it went along. All I could think of is that her kids were not disciplined enough to make it in a real school.

[jennybeast · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this book -- however, if you are going for the audio book, know that Eloisa James is the reader as well. She talks really, really fast. Many of the observations in the book are short. The effect is kind of like an autobiography by tweet. Nonetheless, I liked her stories. I liked her observations and her family and her adventure abroad. It's a good book -- perhaps even a better book in print format.

[pattylee-621744 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Probably really 3.5, but James has a lovely sense of humor so she gets a nudge up. To address the other reviews- yes, the snippets are a bit, well, snippety. Some are very poetic and you wish they were longer. Some are funny and you wish they were longer. The breaks in between (there is no organization here I could discern, except chronological- the progress of her year in Paris) are indeed longer and you can see what a very good writer she is, in case you wondered. You come away wanting to catch the first plane to Paris and wanting to meet James and her delightful, but crazy, family.

[deltaqueen50 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When she both lost her mother to cancer and went through a battle with that disease herself, romance writer Eloisa James decided to celebrate life and packed up her family and moved to Paris for a year. She and her Italian-American husband took sabbaticals from the university where they lectured, enrolled their kids in an Italian school in Paris and found themselves an apartment.

Rather than a detailed step-by-step story, Paris in Love is a series of entries from her journal that she kept that year and touches on many things but her love of Paris shines through it all. Humorous, joyful, interesting and informative this book was a delight. Whether she is writing about her children, 14 year old Luca and 10 year old Anna, her studies of how Frenchwomen are so fashionable and chic, or rhapsodizing over the food this was a lovely way to be introduced to that world famous city. Definitely falling into the class of travel memoir, James avoids expressing her inner thoughts and emotions and keeps the narrative light and lively.

I have not read anything by this author before, but I am definitely now in the market to try one of her romance novels. Paris in Love was a lovely introduction to this author, the short diary-like entries made this a great book for dipping in and out of and for anyone who has ever fantasized about running away to Paris, this is a great way to do just that.

[goodlorde · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I thoroughly enjoyed listening to the audiobook of this charmingly funny book written by best-selling romance novelist Eloisa James. While most of the anecdotes about Eloisa's sabbatical year in Paris are delightful in themselves, I was also totally won over by the way Eloisa narrates this book. I periodically re-listen the audiobook because I enjoy Eloisa's narration so much.

[rmckeown_9 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of my favorite cities in the world is Paris, France. I made a number of trips there and always found it to be most enchanting. When I came across a slim memoir, Paris in Love by Eloisa James, I could not resist despite the fact it is obviously directed at women. The parts of the story involving women’s issues and shopping for haute couture, were sometimes funny, but the parts about food, cooking, and visiting art galleries and museums brought back many fond memories. Eloise James is the pen name of Mary Bly, a tenured professor of English Literature at Fordham University. She writes best-selling Regency romance novels under her pen name.

Eloise lost her mother to Cancer, and two years later, she received a diagnosis of the same disease. She went through courses of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, and following an optimistic appraisal by her oncologist, she decided to take a sabbatical move her husband, Alessandro, son, Luca, and daughter, Anna to Paris for a year. The memoir is set up in an interesting way. She begins most chapters with short essays – which grow longer as the story progresses – followed by brief nuggets detailing their adventures.

One of the things I admire in the French is their tolerance for dogs in all aspects of society. Here is one of those nuggets. James Writes, “Last night we trotted out to our local Thai ‘gastronomique’ restaurant which means it’s a trifle more fancy than average and serves mango cocktails. A man and his son came in, trailed by a very old, lame golden retriever. The dog felt like lying down, legs straight out, in the middle of the aisle running down the restaurant – on a Friday night. The waiter and all customers patiently stepped over and around him, over and over and over…Bravo, France!” (34).

Many of these nuggets involve the close attention to detail so necessary to a writer. She writes, “Alessandro and I followed an exquisite pair of legs out of the Métro today. They were clad in flowery black lace stockings and dark red pumps. Their owner wore a coat with five buttons closing the back flap, and gloves that matched her pumps precisely. We walked briskly up the steps, and I turned around to see the front of the coat, only to find that the lady in question was at least seventy. She was both dignified and très chic. Old age, à la parisienne!” (49). At the end of the memoir, Eloisa comes to appreciate the way French women dress and act. In fact, I think I might have seen that women several times in several places.

Another subject Eloisa attends to is literature. It moves her as much as it moves me. She writes, “Alessandro came in to check on me at one point, sympathetic about my cold but very disapproving when he realized my pile of soggy tissues was the result of tears rather than a virus. ‘I never cry when I read,’ he pointed out, with perfect truth. His nighttime reading, a biography of Catherine the Great, seemed unlikely tp generate tears, even from one susceptible to sentimentality as I. His book didn’t seem like much fun, especially after I inquired about the one thing I knew about Catherine – to wit, her purported erotic encounters with equines – and he informed me that the empress was a misunderstood feminist whose sexual inventory, while copious, was nevertheless conservative. Nothing to cry about there” (61).

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Eloisa James’ memoir, Paris in Love. I especially liked the handy list of restaurants and museums she visited. I plan on taking this book along on my next trip to the city of lights. 5 stars

--Jim, 7/14/16

[theyodamom · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

If I never wanted to go to Paris before I do now. Ms. James writing reads like a travel log with short quick views of her and her families adventure in Paris. She has just went through a battle with cancer and has a fresh view on life she shares with her readers. She has run a away from it all to Paris. Her, her Italian husband two kids and a dog. It is reality with a wonderful sense of humor. the ugly, the beautiful and the wondrous are all shown in her memoirs.

I found it a quick delightful read and enjoyed every minute.

[mtbearded1_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

66 of 75 for 2015. As a rule, I pick up just about every book I find that is even remotely about Paris. It is no secret that Paris is my second favorite city in the world, and in many ways feels like a second home to me. When I find a book about an American living in Paris, walking through this eminently walkable city, I have to read that book and relive my own adventures in the City of Light. Eloisa James' memoir about a sabbatical year spent with her family in Paris is just such a book, and a true delight. Throw into the mix that Ms. James' husband is an Italian academic with family in Italy, and their two children are attending an Italian language school in Paris, and the possibilities for humor (and love) increase dramatically. James, an accomplished author and academic, takes on the challenge of living as an ex-pat (well, for one year) with style and grace, and this book is the result. If you, like me, love Paris and can't get enough of that city, you owe it to yourself to read Eloisa James' memoir. I give it my highest recommendation.

[michigantrumpet_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Disappointed as it is largely a collection of Facebook posts and tweets, interspersed with a few longer selections. It didn't seem as if much work went into pulling it all together. US author mother drags husband and children to Paris for a year and survives to tell about it. There are some funny bits involving cultural misunderstandings, as well as a much-beloved and overly-fed dog.

[borbet · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Light, charming memoir of the author's sabbatical in Paris. The book's origin as Facebook posts and Twitter entries is apparent -- James strings together many small observations to give a picture of her family's time living in Paris. There's no attempt to draw weightier conclusions than the experience can provide -- and that's refreshing.

[sriemann_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Interesting style of writing - blurbs that began life as FB or Twitter entries, with occasional fleshed-out essays. Enjoyed this style, since it went quickly, and gave many different mini-vignettes of James' life in Paris. Her children, esp. her daughter, were hilarious to read about. Also, I want to know how Milo the gargantuanly obese chihuahua is doing.

[bookworm12_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This memoir is based on the author’s time in Paris. She moves to the famous city from her home in New Jersey with her two children and Italian husband in tow. The family’s goal is to embrace a sweeter, slower life for a single year, savoring food and experiences.

The author, by her own admission, compiled her Facebook and Twitter posts about her time in Paris to create this “memoir.” The result is a completely disjointed book. There are funny bits and astute observations, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that the entire book is a series of non sequiturs with the loosest of threads holding it together. She’ll say something about her daughter’s difficult time adjusting to her new school and then the very next line is about a delicious meal she ate and then the next mentions their overweight chihuahua.

It was sweet to read about the wonderful meals she ate and museums she saw, but for me it wasn’t enough to justify a book. The format was too fragmented and I probably would have enjoyed it more if I’d read them on Facebook, in the original form they were intended.

BOTTOM LINE: There are too many great Parisian memoirs out there to make this one worthwhile. Read it only if you’re in the mood for a tiny taste of Paris and don’t care what form it comes in.  

[rakerman_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It's a collection of Facebook posts. "Paris in little tiny disconnected fragments" would be a more accurate title.

[lovestampmom · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had such a fun time reading this book that I wished it went on forever…

I have no idea Eloisa James was a famous writer before I read the book. Evidently she is a wildly famous historical romance author and an English professor in a University. However, I’m glad that I didn’t know her before I read the book, since I felt like reading the journal entries of a dear friend or the advice giving by another Mother friend with children of the same age. There is no way I could have the same experience if I had known how popular she was.

After recovering from breast cancer, Eloisa took a year off from teaching and her American life, sold her house and car, and moved to Paris for a year. She moved there with her Italian husband, who is also a professor, her teen son and her 10-year old daughter. This book is a collection from her blog and Facebook posts that she had written during that journey. What made this book so fun to read was Eloisa’s wit and humor, and her ability to make every minor detail of her Parisian life interesting.

Here’s one of her passage about skinny Paris women:

“I have discovered at least one secret of thin French women. We were in a restaurant last night, with a chic family seated at the next table. The bread arrived, and a skinny adolescent girl reached for it. Without missing a beat, maman picked up the basket and stowed it on the bookshelf next to the table. I ate more of my bread in sympathy.”

A regular street scene in Paris:

“Archetypal French scene: two boys playing in the street with baguettes were pretending not that they were swords, as I first assumed, but giant penises.”

She also wrote about museums, shops, churches, schools, statues, bridges, parks, French women and men, fashion, people, sights, wonderful Parisian food as well as not-to-miss paintings and pastries. Since I’ve been to Paris before and her detailed and accurate descriptions made me miss the city terribly. Her comparisons of French and American parenting were interesting to read, and quite similar to what Pamela Druckerman wrote about in Bringing up Bebe, another book about France. Her facts about Paris were reliable and accurate; her observations of subtle differences were fun to ponder over. Reading it was like experiencing everything Parisian first hand. Overall, I think it’s a book worth reading, for both people who had been to Paris or not, although it’s kind of short due to the format.

[knitwit2_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A writer and her husband take a year long sabatical in France. She reads her Great Uncle Claude's memoir of his time in Paris and sees similarities and differences with herself. There is a mother-in-law from Italy that we might have learned more about, but i got the sense that the author was a little afraid of her. The stories of the mother-in-law's obese dog were entertaining. She used an interesting writing technique, It was like reading a series of FaceBook posts, I liked it - but it felt oddly disjointed.

[rglossne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

After an encounter with cancer, the author and her family moved to Paris for a year She shares with us her daily life and impressions which originally took the form of tweets or facebook status updates. Her precocious children and Italian husband, her husband's family, and the city of Paris itself all make this a compulsively readable memoir.
I smiled all the way through it.

[whitreidtan · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Having lost her mother to cancer and then beaten breast cancer herself, romance author and Shakespeare professor Eloisa James (the pen name of Mary Bly) wanted a chance to live out a dream. So she and her Italian husband, Alessandro, a fellow professor, and their two children set about winnowing down their possessions, put their suburban home on the market, took sabbaticals from their respective universities, and moved to Paris for a year. During the course of that French year, James updated her Facebook status and Tweeted about their experience living as ex-pats and it is these snippets, slightly expanded, plus a few longer vignettes that have been collected into this light memoir of their year abroad.


James offers brief snapshots of ordinary life in Paris. She's captured the way they all meet life in this foreign culture. There's the kids' adjustment to their Italian school, the challenge and struggle of learning all their subjects in another language (despite the fact that they know Italian thanks to their father), and the negotiation of the social ins and outs of a new school. She offers minute descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells around their charming neighborhood. She rhapsodizes about the shopping and the food so readily available to them and their endless parade of welcome guests. She tells of trips to Italy to see her mother-in-law, Marina, and Milo, the dog masquerading as a furry speed bump who once belonged to the family but now lives in Italy permanently, growing ever fatter off of delicious table scraps, and she tells of Marina's visit to them in Paris. She captures the daily existence, complete with humorous moments, thoughtful pauses, frustrations, and joys of raising a family while having the flexibility of writing and researching from anywhere in the world. That these moments are in Paris rather than in the US makes them seem slightly exotic but aside from setting, in many ways they are really universal.


Arranged chronologically, the brief paragraphs of the memoir provide a nice amuse bouche of a book. But the very nature of the frothy and delectable brief bits means there is a skimming, superficial feel to the memoir. It comes across as fleeting and insubstantial, lacking a narrative cohesiveness and feeling sketched, unfinished in some way. I imagine that it was beyond delightful to be on the receiving end of the status updates and tweets but I just don't know that the format works in favor of a completed memoir. James is a beautiful writer though and what she has captured and describes in the short paragraphs is very much the essence of each moment. Perhaps this is better as a book to dip into and out of over a long span of time rather than reading it in one sitting. It is a tiny confection and must be approached as such.

[matamgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I do not as a whole like books in which the author spends a year in Paris and gushes about how wonderful Paris is. However Eloisa James can do whatever she wants because I loved this book. I loved the style it was written in, I loved that it made me want to love Paris again (Paris and I have a love-hate relationship) and the cast of characters was just delightful. It did make me want to get on a plane and go there.

This was a review copy given to me by the publisher.

[aelizabethj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm torn on to how to rate this book - I wasn't aware that the book was just a series of barely expanded Facebook posts, so while I absolutely loved the Paris that Eloisa James wrote about, I couldn't help but feel like it would have been better if she had expanded on more of her posts. I do love Paris though, and this was a quick easy read. 3.5 stars

[carissa.green · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

She warns us: This memoir of James' year in Paris is an edited version of Facebook posts and Tweets, interspersed with some "longer" (2-6 page) essays. As a memoir, it is flimsy, organized mostly around the theme of "one year in Paris," although there are some recurring motifs of living with cancer and aging, living life to the fullest, my crazy relatives, raising teenagers is hell, etc. Truthfully, it often feels like a report on what she ate, where she shopped, and how her children are doing in their fancy school. If you're an upper-middle-class woman of a certain age who has had fantasies of chucking it all and moving to Paris, you're the target audience here (especially considering the "where to shop" coda). If you crave a real meaty book about living in the great city, there are better choices.

Honestly, with the format of tiny, disjointed paragraphs, this book is best for fans of Shakespearean scholar Mary Bly or romance writer Eloisa James, or perhaps moms who can only read in 45-second snippets due to the constant interruption of small children -- that is just enough time to complete each little section. James is a good writer, and the prose here is tight and occasionally sparkling, but it's a light, rambling confection without much point. -cg

[amanderson_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A delightful memoir of the author's year in Paris with her family. She is both a bestselling romance novelist and a professor of English lit. So I figured the book would be fun and have light humorous touches - it did. I was trepidatious when I realized it was written in a kind of short entry Facebook update/blog post style, but it was good. Made for light hearted (mostly) short vignettes of life in Paris with a 15 year old son, younger daughter, and Italian husband. The kids attend school in Paris for the year and she shares details about their goings on as well. Would make a better purchase than library read, as you want to pick it up and dip into it now and then in smaller doses, rather than a marathon reading session.

[berly_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a wonderful little peek into the daily life of New York Times bestselling author Eloisa James. She decided one day to take a sabbatical, sell her house, and move her family to Paris. Her year there is told in funny, loving excerpts, covering the antics of her two children, the wonderful food, and the ups and downs of married life all set in one of the most enchanting and beautiful cities. A light, fun read.

[caseylondon · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A fun and spirited romp through Paris with romance writer Eloisa James. You'll laugh and get teary as you read about her family's year in Paris - the food (oh - the food), the French (oh, yes - guess who lives in Paris?), her children's experiences in an Italian language school in the City of Light (of course when you read the story you can discover the logic in this this choice), and her passion for romance and all things fashionable in their adopted hometown. I smile just thinking about this book.

[debnance_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Most of us just can’t travel to Paris every summer.
This would be a sad thing, a tragic thing, really, if it weren’t for marvelous books like these that take us to Paris anyway, saving us $1213 (price of an airline ticket to Paris minus the cost of this book) and sixteen hours on plane.
Paris in Love is a book with tiny, tiny stories, some mere paragraphs, about the year she and her family spent in Paris.
Absolutely delightful. If you can’t travel to Paris this summer, you must read this little book.

[mthelibrarian_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The author and her husband sell their house and move their family to Paris for a year. I enjoyed the many vignettes of her children's school lives, Christmas and winter in Paris, stories from the many small museums not on typical tourist trip plans, May Day in Paris and liles of the valley, the story of a friend with ovarian cancer, and side visits to Italy. I struggled initially with the book's format: a short narrative to open each chapter, followed by paragraph-length posts (Facebook-like) that jumped around. I wished for a more narrative account for the first half of the book. By the end, though, I wanted to hop onto the next plane to Paris for a year! If you're going to Paris, don't miss the list of shopping, dining and museum recommendations in the back of the book.

[sharonr53 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a wonderful book this is! Eloisa James has written a memoir that is at times funny, romantic, and poignant. After a health crisis, she and her husband Allessandro both take a sabbatical from their respective teaching positions and move their family to Paris. The book is chock full of little vignettes of their life in France, adjusting to the cultural differences, finding their way around the city and even bridging the language issue. I particularly like the stories about her feisty daughter, Anna and her run- ins with a fellow classmate who eventually becomes her friend. There were so many interesting parts to the book. My heart felt sad when Ms. James wrote about a small museum of French historical treasures started by a local banker and later imparts the fact that the house was donated to the French government, his son died as a soldier for France and yet the entire family was shipped off to Auschwitz and never returned.
The American in me loved that some of the highly touted French cuisine is in fact, not so good, but the description of most of the food is simply amazing. The markets, the stores, the buildings make one want to chuck it all and head to France. The stories of the homeless man living in a tent with two little trees as his enjoyment in life make you appreciate life here. I had a good laugh with the stories about Milo, the family’s part time Chihuahua who lives with Allesandro’s mother in Venice and weighs 27 pounds! Mostly, I enjoyed the everyday stories of a family adjusting to change and loving being together. I read most of this book while writing a complicated grant for the library where I work and I couldn’t wait to get home and start reading and feeling the stress just flow away with every page.

[stacey42_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Eloisa James shares with us the year she spent in Paris with her husband and two children. The writing style is in the form of short updates from her Facebook and Twitter feeds & slightly longer parts from emails. This keeps events moving along & lets you see things without a lot of clutter. It keeps you very focused on her. I like the style. It was a fun memoir with plenty of detail about loife in Paris, the adjustments, the shopping, the kids' adventures in schooling, the people they all encounter and of course, the food. Overall I found this a very enjoyable book

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After being diagnosed with breast cancer, losing a breast author James decides that she and her husband should take a sabbatical and spend a year living in Paris. They take their two children and move into a quaint apartment. In a series of twitters, facebook entries and e-mails James highlight their year abroad as well as the problems her children had adjusting. She talks about the scenery, the history , the shopkeepers and the food in this oftentimes humorous and fun memoir. Think what I liked most about this memoir is that it did not come off self indulgent but more as a re-celebration of life and all it entails.

[dotland101 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have a bit of Eloisa James' books in my little library, read a few of them and like them all. This is the only non-romance I've ever read of Eloisa James' books... OMG!! I L-O-V-E IT!! I'm glad I won this book from Early Reviewers. This book is wonderful... delicious, colorful, delightful and soooooooooo hilarious. What a hoot!! I just love Anna, she's so funny without even trying, what an imp! Just love her, she made this book all the more, "alive." Every time I came across her name, never fail, she made me laugh so. This book is wonderful, it jogged and stirred my personal memories of Paris, long forgotten in the past for me. The chocolate (Boy! am I a sucker for good chocolate, and "dark" please), the French cuisine, places and people. This is not a tour guide book, but a wonderful story, an adventure and a dream fulfilled, a daring decision driven by life changing experience to up and moved her (American/Italian) family to live in a foreign country for a year, a love story of a place, Paris and her people of which we heard of but don't really know them or see them up close, here's your chance to tag along with Eloisa James and let her introduce you to Paris, and let Anna entertain you. Oh! Did I mention this is the cheapest way to go to Paris if you don't have a lot of $$$ right now? I have four words for you... go get this book. Vive La France. ;)

[camellia1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I received this book from Early Reviewers.

Eloisa James is a romance novelist and Shakespearan scholar who spent a year in France with her husband and two children after being successfully treated for breast cancer. This book consists of a series of short descriptions about that year that were adapted from facebook and twitter posts.

I really enjoyed this book some of the stories, particularly those dealing with her children, made me laugh out loud, while others made me cry. I also loved the descriptions of all the chocolate! I was less enamored with the descriptions of the clothes - both in the stores and on the Parisian women - that were fairly common. The format of the book made it easy to breeze past the less interesting bits and continue on to find out what her kids were going to do next.