French Toast
An American in Paris Celebrates the Maddening Mysteries of the French
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Peter Mayle may have spent a year in Provence, but Harriet Welty Rochefort writes from the wise perspective of one who has spent more than twenty years living among the French. From a small town in Iowa to the City of Light, Harriet has done what so many of dream of one day doing-she picked up and moved to France. But it has not been twenty years of fun and games; Harriet has endured her share of cultural bumps, bruises, and psychic adjustments along the way.
In French Toast, she shares her hard-earned wisdom and does as much as one woman can to demystify the French. She makes sense of their ever-so-French thoughts on food, money, sex, love, marriage, manners, schools, style, and much more. She investigates such delicate matters as how to eat asparagus, how to approach Parisian women, how to speak to merchants, how to drive, and, most important, how to make a seven-course meal in a silk blouse without an apron! Harriet's first-person account offers both a helpful reality check and a lot of very funny moments.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
During the 1970s, Rochefort moved from Shenandoah, Iowa, to Paris, where she met and married her husband, Philippe. Here, she offers her reflections on what it's like to be the wife of a Frenchman and the mother of two French-American children. Although presented with a confidence that comes with long experience, the observations shared (Rochefort's but also those of French and fellow expatriate friends) are hardly illuminating. Rochefort relies on her experiences with French in-laws and friends to conclude that the French, unlike their American counterparts, would rather talk about sex than money, are quarrelsome and require their children to work hard in school. She finds that French wives are wonderful cooks who allow their husbands to dominate the conversation at parties and are always responsible for packing their husbands' suitcases. French husbands, according to Rochefort, really do shower less than American men but are infinitely more relaxed and adept at flirtation and seduction. (She comments that a single woman can live safely in France because French men aren't as oppressively aggressive as American men). In sum, her memoir, though competently written, trades in what appear to be old stereotypes--which, even if true, bring nothing new to our understanding of the French.
