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Breathless: An American Girl in Paris
In the early 1960s, most middle-class American women in their twenties had their lives laid out for marriage, children, and life in the suburbs. Most, but not all. Breathless is the story of a girl who represents those who rebelled against conventional expectations. Paris was a magnet for those eager to resist domesticity, and like many young women of the decade, Nancy K. Miller was enamored of everything French—from perfume and Hermès scarves to the writing of Simone de Beauvoir and the New Wave films of Jeanne Moreau. After graduating from Barnard College in 1961, Miller set out for a year in Paris, with a plan to take classes at the Sorbonne and live out a great romantic life inspired by the movies. After a string of sexual misadventures, she gave up her short-lived freedom and married an American expatriate who promised her a lifetime of three-star meals and five-star hotels. But her husband wasn't who he said he was, and she eventually had to leave Paris and her dreams behind. This stunning memoir chronicles a young woman’s coming-of-age tale, and offers a glimpse into the intimate lives of girls before feminism.
248 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2013
About the author
Nancy K. Miller
27 books25 followersNancy K. Miller is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, winner of the Jewish Journal Prize for 2012, and the story of a quest to recreate her family’s lost history. A well-known feminist scholar, Miller has published family memoirs, personal essays, and literary criticism. She is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches classes in memoir, graphic novel, and women’s studies.
Miller lectures widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is anthologized in popular volumes on autobiography and collections of feminist essays. She also co-edits the Gender and Culture series at Columbia University Press, which she co-founded in 1983 with the late Carolyn Heilbrun.
After graduating from Barnard College, Miller sailed to Paris to study French literature and complete a master’s degree. Already in love with the city from movies and novels, she hoped to create a new, more sophisticated identity for her twenty-year-old, nice New York-Jewish-girl self. Several years of adventures and misadventures later, including marriage to an American ex-pat, Miller returned to New York minus the husband but ready to reinvent herself as an academic and writer.
Her new book (forthcoming from Seal, Fall 2013) describes that odyssey.
Miller lectures widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is anthologized in popular volumes on autobiography and collections of feminist essays. She also co-edits the Gender and Culture series at Columbia University Press, which she co-founded in 1983 with the late Carolyn Heilbrun.
After graduating from Barnard College, Miller sailed to Paris to study French literature and complete a master’s degree. Already in love with the city from movies and novels, she hoped to create a new, more sophisticated identity for her twenty-year-old, nice New York-Jewish-girl self. Several years of adventures and misadventures later, including marriage to an American ex-pat, Miller returned to New York minus the husband but ready to reinvent herself as an academic and writer.
Her new book (forthcoming from Seal, Fall 2013) describes that odyssey.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
July 9, 2015
This book's average rating here on Goodreads is not the best, and I suspected it was probably because of the way Miller kept mentioning the influences that led her to move to Paris in the first place: de Beauvoir and Sartre, Colette, Godard. I thought for sure reviewers would think she was acting too intellectual and showing off (for the record, I loved that aspect of the book). But I was wrong--it turns out the low ratings are the result of too much boy craziness and sexytimes. Guess you can't please everyone!
It's true: young Nancy Miller seems to go from one man to the next with scarcely any time in between, and usually with some overlap. She has more pregnancy scares than such a smart person should have and makes some terrible choices. She barely seems attracted to most of these people and barely seems to love the man she marries. It can get a bit exasperating at times.
However, I eventually came to see this memoir in a slightly different way. Miller moves to Paris not just because it's the city of her dreams, but because she's trying to establish her independence from her parents. However, in the early 1960s, it was difficult for many women to imagine an independence from their parents that didn't involve getting married. Paradoxical, yes--trading one form of dependence for another, because a lot of women quit working after marriage. Yet there was a part of Miller that knew that getting married wasn't really her own path to independence--hence her tendency to say yes to just about anything. As she puts it (paraphrasing), "How can I be sure I don't want to do something unless I try it?"
This book was very well-written, dealt with some serious issues, and was a welcome change from the typically frothy Paris memoir where the heroine, who isn't even looking for a man, somehow has the best-looking, most romantic Frenchman fall madly in love with her, and whose only real problem is that French people can be so standoffish sometimes. If that's what you're looking for, try this or this. But a glance at my ratings will give you a sense of where my own preference lies.
It's true: young Nancy Miller seems to go from one man to the next with scarcely any time in between, and usually with some overlap. She has more pregnancy scares than such a smart person should have and makes some terrible choices. She barely seems attracted to most of these people and barely seems to love the man she marries. It can get a bit exasperating at times.
However, I eventually came to see this memoir in a slightly different way. Miller moves to Paris not just because it's the city of her dreams, but because she's trying to establish her independence from her parents. However, in the early 1960s, it was difficult for many women to imagine an independence from their parents that didn't involve getting married. Paradoxical, yes--trading one form of dependence for another, because a lot of women quit working after marriage. Yet there was a part of Miller that knew that getting married wasn't really her own path to independence--hence her tendency to say yes to just about anything. As she puts it (paraphrasing), "How can I be sure I don't want to do something unless I try it?"
This book was very well-written, dealt with some serious issues, and was a welcome change from the typically frothy Paris memoir where the heroine, who isn't even looking for a man, somehow has the best-looking, most romantic Frenchman fall madly in love with her, and whose only real problem is that French people can be so standoffish sometimes. If that's what you're looking for, try this or this. But a glance at my ratings will give you a sense of where my own preference lies.
April 20, 2014
The many conquests of a female Casanova? Or just your average cross-cultural coming-of-age tale? I wasn’t sure precisely what Miller wanted this book to be, but Francophiles and those who have gone a little wild on a year abroad should like it all the same.
Miller, a CUNY professor of English, titled her memoir of six years’ sojourn in Paris in the 1960s after a favorite Nouvelle Vague film. A young Jewish girl from Barnard University, Miller headed to Paris for her master’s degree with one French lover already under her belt (apologies for the awkward pun) – a married doctor of her family’s acquaintance.
As in the 2009 film An Education (of which this book strongly reminded me), Miller’s ensuing ‘education’ is more sexual than academic. Her first tutor tried to seduce her, and her string of boyfriends (including another married man; Leo, a biker dude from Columbia University; and Bernard, who grew up in Tunisia) produced two pregnancy scares, one of which ended in abortion. Ironically, when she married Jim, an Irish-American Catholic starting up his own dodgy language school, she couldn’t seem to get pregnant anymore.
All these liaisons were carefully edited before they entered her letters home to her parents; her “penchant for epistolary romance” involved mastering the art of omission. Miller saw her often tawdry affairs as being in some grand French tradition, like Les Liaisons Dangereuses brought into the twentieth century. What is most shocking for the reader to realize is that there was no family planning available in France in the early 1960s; Miller had to travel to London to have a diaphragm fitted! (So much for the stereotypes about those two nations’ contrasting approaches to sexuality.)
I enjoyed this memoir well enough, but probably would have liked less sex and more in the way of cultural detail or anecdotes from Miller’s studies and subsequent teaching. She submitted a PhD proposal to Roland Barthes, after all – but even that great story is subsumed by yet another affair, this one with a co-translator she was working with at the time.
With less of a focus on the romances, Miller might have given a better overview of the challenges of life abroad: “France was hard on foreigners. It was exhausting to spend your life in translation.” I might have liked to hear her expand on how she felt both more and less Jewish in Paris. I did, however, appreciate her thoughts on loneliness. Her third year in Paris was spent in a cozy maid’s accommodation – “I loved my room, but I didn’t love my life,” she concludes. I can certainly relate to that.
Miller, a CUNY professor of English, titled her memoir of six years’ sojourn in Paris in the 1960s after a favorite Nouvelle Vague film. A young Jewish girl from Barnard University, Miller headed to Paris for her master’s degree with one French lover already under her belt (apologies for the awkward pun) – a married doctor of her family’s acquaintance.
As in the 2009 film An Education (of which this book strongly reminded me), Miller’s ensuing ‘education’ is more sexual than academic. Her first tutor tried to seduce her, and her string of boyfriends (including another married man; Leo, a biker dude from Columbia University; and Bernard, who grew up in Tunisia) produced two pregnancy scares, one of which ended in abortion. Ironically, when she married Jim, an Irish-American Catholic starting up his own dodgy language school, she couldn’t seem to get pregnant anymore.
All these liaisons were carefully edited before they entered her letters home to her parents; her “penchant for epistolary romance” involved mastering the art of omission. Miller saw her often tawdry affairs as being in some grand French tradition, like Les Liaisons Dangereuses brought into the twentieth century. What is most shocking for the reader to realize is that there was no family planning available in France in the early 1960s; Miller had to travel to London to have a diaphragm fitted! (So much for the stereotypes about those two nations’ contrasting approaches to sexuality.)
I enjoyed this memoir well enough, but probably would have liked less sex and more in the way of cultural detail or anecdotes from Miller’s studies and subsequent teaching. She submitted a PhD proposal to Roland Barthes, after all – but even that great story is subsumed by yet another affair, this one with a co-translator she was working with at the time.
With less of a focus on the romances, Miller might have given a better overview of the challenges of life abroad: “France was hard on foreigners. It was exhausting to spend your life in translation.” I might have liked to hear her expand on how she felt both more and less Jewish in Paris. I did, however, appreciate her thoughts on loneliness. Her third year in Paris was spent in a cozy maid’s accommodation – “I loved my room, but I didn’t love my life,” she concludes. I can certainly relate to that.
October 10, 2013
This chronicles the author's struggle to gain personal independence, find herself, and mature while living in Paris in the swinging sixties. This is an honest and raw memoir. There are times when you don't like the writer very much, but there are other times when she is vulnerable. This may be one of the most truthful memoirs I have ever read and was well worth my time.
I received an advanced reading copy from NetGalley.
I received an advanced reading copy from NetGalley.
March 7, 2014
HOW TO BE LOST: SEX (RACE, CLASS, AND GENDER) IN THE CITY OF LIGHT: My March column at Bookslut
After graduating from college, I headed to Paris to study contemporary French philosophy -- Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze -- and semiotics with Julia Kristeva. I spent most evenings contemplating the meaning of life while drinking Scotch in a gay bar in the Marais. I lived in a series of chambres de bonne with a Turkish toilet down the hall and had a boyfriend in New York, a lover in Italy, and another in London, whose visits to me in the City of Love I expertly juggled. I believed I was following the tried and true path toward a life of an intellectual and sensual super-sophistiquée.
The odysseys of American writers and artists in Paris -- Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin et cetera -- are legendary. But what of the legions of young Americans, especially women, who, like Patricia Franchini (played by Jean Seberg) in Godard's film Breathless, came to Paris on study abroad programs ostensibly to attend classes at the Sorbonne, but who really were in search of a degree in the School of Life?
It seems there is a small but growing literature on the subject.
The most comprehensive study is historian Whitney Walton's Internationalism, National Identities and Study Abroad: France and the United States 1890-1970 (2010). This subgenre's pioneering narrative, however, is Elaine Dundy's classic autobiographical novel The Dud Avocado (1958), written the year before Breathless was made. It recounts the (mis)adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, middle-class, Midwesterner, and aspiring actress. Sally Jay occasionally goes to a lecture at the Sorbonne, chats with exchange students, and hangs out at Le Select in Montparnasse. Mostly, with her hair dyed pink and wearing her eclectic outfits, she explores Paris seeking new experiences. She goes to "lesbian joints," poses nude for an artist, nurses hangovers at the Ritz bar, and beds a wide range of men. Funny, charming, perceptive, surprising, a master of irony and understatement, Sally Jay is astonishingly real. Her year in Paris is an attempt to reconcile love, sex, career, and respect -- the eternal female conundrum. Wearily she concludes, "it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century."
In 1961, Barnard graduate, Nancy K. Miller, now a renowned feminist scholar, left New York in search of intellectual and sexual freedom in Paris. A "real-life Dud Avocado," Miller's Breathless: An American Girl in Paris (2013) is an account of both her sexual awakening and her developing feminist consciousness. She begins her Parisian adventure by sleeping with a married doctor, a friend of her parents' charged with looking out for her. While studying French literature at the Sorbonne, she has a several affairs with hapless men. Second wave feminism still a decade away, Miller sees few options: she marries, disastrously, another American ex-patriot escaping his own "family plots."
"I had hoped that in marrying Jim," she writes, "and living with him in Paris, I would escape my nice-Jewish-girl destiny. I longed for glamour and style, Frenchness, Jean Seberg in Breathless, or Jeanne Moreau (even more of a reach) [...in...] Les Liaisons Dangereuses." Moving in with Jim, however, she "voluntarily preempted the task of washing his socks." Urged by her female friends to have children, she was told that by not having them she wasn't "delivering as a woman."
Miller's account resembles Mary McCarthy's The Group in its bold, frank descriptions of sex, contraception, and abortion, and her acerbic wit and uncommon insight. Her political awareness shifts and broadens while abroad. "From here the situation in Vietnam," she writes to her parents, "seems absolutely insane -- there's a feeling of wonder that American policy can be so blind to reality." Of the Kennedy assassination, she writes: "The French were mystified by how the protection of a president could be so inefficient. They immediately imagined a conspiracy theory."
An affair with a German worker redecorating her and Jim's new apartment leads Miller out of her bad marriage and back home. Miller's zestful, poignant memoir brilliantly evokes how it feels to be a young woman in Paris steeped in desire and confusion, seeking answers and clarity, yet sensing that a state of uncertainty and amazement may be the most thrilling of all.
During the period the French call "les trente glorieuses" (the thirty glorious years) -- the post-war recovery years from 1945 to 1975 -- three young women who would later be among the United States' most iconic public figures of the century, spent time studying in Paris: Jacqueline Bouvier, 1949-1950; Susan Sontag, 1957-1958; and Angela Davis, 1963-1964. Their experiences are chronicled in Alice Kaplan's extraordinary account Dreaming in French (2013). Kaplan, who explored her own junior year abroad in French Lessons (1994), considers three American women from different generations, cultures, and classes. Examining both commonalities and divergences in their Parisian experiences, she sheds fascinating new light on each woman's trajectory and reveals how these exploits significantly influenced them throughout their later lives.
When the twenty-year-old Catholic debutante Jacqueline Bouvier arrived in Paris on the Smith program, French women had been exercising their right to vote for five years and Simone de Beauvoir was about to publish the second volume of her seminal The Second Sex. Jackie's immediate interests, however, lay elsewhere. Her grandfather had insisted they were descended from French royalty; though the lie was eventually exposed, Jackie was intent on proving that if not of the French aristocracy, she could certainly run with them. Coming from a wealthy East Coast family, she had all the right introductions and was soon attending dinners and soirées with the Parisian elite, her weekends spent riding and hunting at their chateaux. She perfected her French. "I have two lives," she wrote to her stepbrother, "flying from here [the apartment she lived in with a French family] to the Sorbonne and Reid Hall, in a lovely, quiet, rainy world -- or, like the maid on her day out, putting on a fur coat and going to the middle of town and being swanky at the Ritz." A decade later, accompanying her husband on his first trip to France as president of the United States, Jacqueline Kennedy dismissed her interpreter so she could speak directly with de Gaulle. Later, as a book editor, she mostly published work connected to French culture or history.
Susan Sontag was more likely to hang out at the Deux Magots or Café de Flore in the Latin Quarter than at the Ritz. After college she had married Philip Rieff, had a baby, David, then left them to go live in Paris with her lover, Harriet Sohmers, who worked for the Herald Tribune. Sontag's crowd included Bernard Frechtman, Jean Genet's agent and translator; Allen Ginsberg; James Baldwin; and Cuban actress and playwright María Irene Fornés (also Sohmers's lover). Sontag received a fellowship from the American Association of University Women to study the metaphysical presuppositions of ethics at the Sorbonne. She read contemporary French literature voraciously, went to the theatre, and, above all, the cinema, often seeing several films a day. Then, as now, Paris was a cinephile's mecca offering movies from all genres and countries, at all hours.
Leaving Paris for New York, Sontag began to write for the New York Review of Books, primarily on French topics. In 1966 she published Against Interpretation, launching her career as "an apostle of the avant-garde." The essay collection, Kaplan writes, "might have been called 'On France': detailed analyses of a whole panoply of French writers and filmmakers and novelists." Sontag wrote about the likes of Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, bringing "French Theory" to America.
Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis, attended segregated schools and lived in a neighborhood nicknamed "Dynamite Hill" because of the incessant bombings by segregationists. To deal with the violent racism she experienced daily, she fantasized she wore a white mask that allowed her to "go unceremoniously into the theater or amusement park or wherever I wanted to go." After she'd had her fun she ripped off the mask, laughing at those she'd duped. Her mastery of French in high school and at Brandeis was an aspect of this mask. France held a mythical power for Black Americans as a place of freedom. James Baldwin had come to Brandeis to lecture in her freshman year. Paris was home to Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and Josephine Baker. Many black American soldiers remained in France after both world wars, finding the country more open and tolerant -- due more to the French mythologizing of black American culture than to the their being anti-racist. Actually, when Angela Davis first went to Paris in the summer of 1962, one of the first things she noticed was the ubiquitous racial slurs against Algerians. She joined the pro-Algerian demonstration on the Place de la Sorbonne, later described in her renowned An Autobiography (1974): "When the flics broke it up with their high power water hoses, they were as vicious as the redneck cops in Birmingham who met the Freedom Riders with their dogs and hoses."
Davis spent her junior year in Paris, the only black student of forty-six in the Hamilton program. Very familiar with the work of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Proust, Camus, and Sartre, she was one of six students advanced enough for an intensive course in contemporary literature at the Sorbonne. While she was in France, four Birmingham girls -- friends and neighbors of Davis's -- died when a bomb exploded in a Baptist Church, and Kennedy was assassinated.
In 1965, after graduating from Brandeis, she studied in Frankfurt with the social critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno, then worked on her PhD with the political theorist Herbert Marcuse at University of California, San Diego. Much of her reading during the years she was developing her own radical political philosophy was in French: Jean-Paul Sartre on colonialism and post-colonialism, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Henri Alleg on torture, Henri Lefebvre and Louis Althusser on Marxist theory, and Daniel Guérin on anarchism.
Later, when Davis was imprisoned for her alleged role in a California courtroom shooting, four hundred French intellectuals, including Daniel Guérin, Jacques Derrida, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes, signed a letter demanding her release. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Foucault, Louis Aragon, and Pablo Picasso wrote another letter of protest to Governor Ronald Reagan. In 1971, sixty thousand people marched in Paris for her liberation. Angela Davis's story, writes Kaplan, itself became mythic.
My own memories of my Paris years are rather hazy. Thirty years on, after reading these excellent books on the both familiar and very diverse experiences of young American women in Paris, I realize what I was really learning in the City of Light was how to be -- and stay -- lost: essential training for a writer and a woman.
After graduating from college, I headed to Paris to study contemporary French philosophy -- Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze -- and semiotics with Julia Kristeva. I spent most evenings contemplating the meaning of life while drinking Scotch in a gay bar in the Marais. I lived in a series of chambres de bonne with a Turkish toilet down the hall and had a boyfriend in New York, a lover in Italy, and another in London, whose visits to me in the City of Love I expertly juggled. I believed I was following the tried and true path toward a life of an intellectual and sensual super-sophistiquée.
The odysseys of American writers and artists in Paris -- Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Baldwin et cetera -- are legendary. But what of the legions of young Americans, especially women, who, like Patricia Franchini (played by Jean Seberg) in Godard's film Breathless, came to Paris on study abroad programs ostensibly to attend classes at the Sorbonne, but who really were in search of a degree in the School of Life?
It seems there is a small but growing literature on the subject.
The most comprehensive study is historian Whitney Walton's Internationalism, National Identities and Study Abroad: France and the United States 1890-1970 (2010). This subgenre's pioneering narrative, however, is Elaine Dundy's classic autobiographical novel The Dud Avocado (1958), written the year before Breathless was made. It recounts the (mis)adventures of Sally Jay Gorce, middle-class, Midwesterner, and aspiring actress. Sally Jay occasionally goes to a lecture at the Sorbonne, chats with exchange students, and hangs out at Le Select in Montparnasse. Mostly, with her hair dyed pink and wearing her eclectic outfits, she explores Paris seeking new experiences. She goes to "lesbian joints," poses nude for an artist, nurses hangovers at the Ritz bar, and beds a wide range of men. Funny, charming, perceptive, surprising, a master of irony and understatement, Sally Jay is astonishingly real. Her year in Paris is an attempt to reconcile love, sex, career, and respect -- the eternal female conundrum. Wearily she concludes, "it was not easy to be a Woman in these stirring times. I said it then and I say it now: it just isn't our century."
In 1961, Barnard graduate, Nancy K. Miller, now a renowned feminist scholar, left New York in search of intellectual and sexual freedom in Paris. A "real-life Dud Avocado," Miller's Breathless: An American Girl in Paris (2013) is an account of both her sexual awakening and her developing feminist consciousness. She begins her Parisian adventure by sleeping with a married doctor, a friend of her parents' charged with looking out for her. While studying French literature at the Sorbonne, she has a several affairs with hapless men. Second wave feminism still a decade away, Miller sees few options: she marries, disastrously, another American ex-patriot escaping his own "family plots."
"I had hoped that in marrying Jim," she writes, "and living with him in Paris, I would escape my nice-Jewish-girl destiny. I longed for glamour and style, Frenchness, Jean Seberg in Breathless, or Jeanne Moreau (even more of a reach) [...in...] Les Liaisons Dangereuses." Moving in with Jim, however, she "voluntarily preempted the task of washing his socks." Urged by her female friends to have children, she was told that by not having them she wasn't "delivering as a woman."
Miller's account resembles Mary McCarthy's The Group in its bold, frank descriptions of sex, contraception, and abortion, and her acerbic wit and uncommon insight. Her political awareness shifts and broadens while abroad. "From here the situation in Vietnam," she writes to her parents, "seems absolutely insane -- there's a feeling of wonder that American policy can be so blind to reality." Of the Kennedy assassination, she writes: "The French were mystified by how the protection of a president could be so inefficient. They immediately imagined a conspiracy theory."
An affair with a German worker redecorating her and Jim's new apartment leads Miller out of her bad marriage and back home. Miller's zestful, poignant memoir brilliantly evokes how it feels to be a young woman in Paris steeped in desire and confusion, seeking answers and clarity, yet sensing that a state of uncertainty and amazement may be the most thrilling of all.
During the period the French call "les trente glorieuses" (the thirty glorious years) -- the post-war recovery years from 1945 to 1975 -- three young women who would later be among the United States' most iconic public figures of the century, spent time studying in Paris: Jacqueline Bouvier, 1949-1950; Susan Sontag, 1957-1958; and Angela Davis, 1963-1964. Their experiences are chronicled in Alice Kaplan's extraordinary account Dreaming in French (2013). Kaplan, who explored her own junior year abroad in French Lessons (1994), considers three American women from different generations, cultures, and classes. Examining both commonalities and divergences in their Parisian experiences, she sheds fascinating new light on each woman's trajectory and reveals how these exploits significantly influenced them throughout their later lives.
When the twenty-year-old Catholic debutante Jacqueline Bouvier arrived in Paris on the Smith program, French women had been exercising their right to vote for five years and Simone de Beauvoir was about to publish the second volume of her seminal The Second Sex. Jackie's immediate interests, however, lay elsewhere. Her grandfather had insisted they were descended from French royalty; though the lie was eventually exposed, Jackie was intent on proving that if not of the French aristocracy, she could certainly run with them. Coming from a wealthy East Coast family, she had all the right introductions and was soon attending dinners and soirées with the Parisian elite, her weekends spent riding and hunting at their chateaux. She perfected her French. "I have two lives," she wrote to her stepbrother, "flying from here [the apartment she lived in with a French family] to the Sorbonne and Reid Hall, in a lovely, quiet, rainy world -- or, like the maid on her day out, putting on a fur coat and going to the middle of town and being swanky at the Ritz." A decade later, accompanying her husband on his first trip to France as president of the United States, Jacqueline Kennedy dismissed her interpreter so she could speak directly with de Gaulle. Later, as a book editor, she mostly published work connected to French culture or history.
Susan Sontag was more likely to hang out at the Deux Magots or Café de Flore in the Latin Quarter than at the Ritz. After college she had married Philip Rieff, had a baby, David, then left them to go live in Paris with her lover, Harriet Sohmers, who worked for the Herald Tribune. Sontag's crowd included Bernard Frechtman, Jean Genet's agent and translator; Allen Ginsberg; James Baldwin; and Cuban actress and playwright María Irene Fornés (also Sohmers's lover). Sontag received a fellowship from the American Association of University Women to study the metaphysical presuppositions of ethics at the Sorbonne. She read contemporary French literature voraciously, went to the theatre, and, above all, the cinema, often seeing several films a day. Then, as now, Paris was a cinephile's mecca offering movies from all genres and countries, at all hours.
Leaving Paris for New York, Sontag began to write for the New York Review of Books, primarily on French topics. In 1966 she published Against Interpretation, launching her career as "an apostle of the avant-garde." The essay collection, Kaplan writes, "might have been called 'On France': detailed analyses of a whole panoply of French writers and filmmakers and novelists." Sontag wrote about the likes of Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, bringing "French Theory" to America.
Growing up in Birmingham, Alabama, Angela Davis, attended segregated schools and lived in a neighborhood nicknamed "Dynamite Hill" because of the incessant bombings by segregationists. To deal with the violent racism she experienced daily, she fantasized she wore a white mask that allowed her to "go unceremoniously into the theater or amusement park or wherever I wanted to go." After she'd had her fun she ripped off the mask, laughing at those she'd duped. Her mastery of French in high school and at Brandeis was an aspect of this mask. France held a mythical power for Black Americans as a place of freedom. James Baldwin had come to Brandeis to lecture in her freshman year. Paris was home to Richard Wright, Chester Himes, and Josephine Baker. Many black American soldiers remained in France after both world wars, finding the country more open and tolerant -- due more to the French mythologizing of black American culture than to the their being anti-racist. Actually, when Angela Davis first went to Paris in the summer of 1962, one of the first things she noticed was the ubiquitous racial slurs against Algerians. She joined the pro-Algerian demonstration on the Place de la Sorbonne, later described in her renowned An Autobiography (1974): "When the flics broke it up with their high power water hoses, they were as vicious as the redneck cops in Birmingham who met the Freedom Riders with their dogs and hoses."
Davis spent her junior year in Paris, the only black student of forty-six in the Hamilton program. Very familiar with the work of Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Proust, Camus, and Sartre, she was one of six students advanced enough for an intensive course in contemporary literature at the Sorbonne. While she was in France, four Birmingham girls -- friends and neighbors of Davis's -- died when a bomb exploded in a Baptist Church, and Kennedy was assassinated.
In 1965, after graduating from Brandeis, she studied in Frankfurt with the social critic and philosopher Theodor Adorno, then worked on her PhD with the political theorist Herbert Marcuse at University of California, San Diego. Much of her reading during the years she was developing her own radical political philosophy was in French: Jean-Paul Sartre on colonialism and post-colonialism, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Henri Alleg on torture, Henri Lefebvre and Louis Althusser on Marxist theory, and Daniel Guérin on anarchism.
Later, when Davis was imprisoned for her alleged role in a California courtroom shooting, four hundred French intellectuals, including Daniel Guérin, Jacques Derrida, Marguerite Duras, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes, signed a letter demanding her release. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Foucault, Louis Aragon, and Pablo Picasso wrote another letter of protest to Governor Ronald Reagan. In 1971, sixty thousand people marched in Paris for her liberation. Angela Davis's story, writes Kaplan, itself became mythic.
My own memories of my Paris years are rather hazy. Thirty years on, after reading these excellent books on the both familiar and very diverse experiences of young American women in Paris, I realize what I was really learning in the City of Light was how to be -- and stay -- lost: essential training for a writer and a woman.
November 11, 2013
Memoirs are supposed to be about interesting people. Or people who've led interesting lives. This is not one of them. This is a memoir of a "nice Jewish girl" (her words, not mine) determined to find her identity by exploring sex in 1960's Paris.
**SPOILER ALERT **
Miller, a daughter of a lawyer and teacher from the Upper West Side, recounts her post-Barnard college years of living in Paris during 1961.
She is determined to escape her controlling parents, but after moving abroad, realizes she's given them even more control over her life. In exchange for her year abroad in France, (at her parent's expense), she agrees to keep in contact via letters on a weekly basis.
Inspired by the French New Wave, she dreams of traveling to France and living abroad, similiar to Jean Seberg in Godard's movie "Breathless". We learn about her sexual adventures with a married Frenchman (who happens to be a friend of her family)and other men. She meets her future husband, also an American expatriate, who asks her to join his French language school. After winning scholarships to teach French, she gets married and continues to teach French. Her parents shower her with a new convertible and a lovely apartment in Paris. She becomes bored...and you can fill in the rest.
I really wanted to like this book, but it's a basic re-telling of a priveleged young woman's experiences abroad in 1960's Paris. Although it is written well,(she's a Creative writing Professor), the story isn't interesting. I wish I could've seen her overcome some struggles or develop inner growth, yet she didn't, since she had the financial safety net of her parents. The poor little rich girl overtones became tiring.
**I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review,
**SPOILER ALERT **
Miller, a daughter of a lawyer and teacher from the Upper West Side, recounts her post-Barnard college years of living in Paris during 1961.
She is determined to escape her controlling parents, but after moving abroad, realizes she's given them even more control over her life. In exchange for her year abroad in France, (at her parent's expense), she agrees to keep in contact via letters on a weekly basis.
Inspired by the French New Wave, she dreams of traveling to France and living abroad, similiar to Jean Seberg in Godard's movie "Breathless". We learn about her sexual adventures with a married Frenchman (who happens to be a friend of her family)and other men. She meets her future husband, also an American expatriate, who asks her to join his French language school. After winning scholarships to teach French, she gets married and continues to teach French. Her parents shower her with a new convertible and a lovely apartment in Paris. She becomes bored...and you can fill in the rest.
I really wanted to like this book, but it's a basic re-telling of a priveleged young woman's experiences abroad in 1960's Paris. Although it is written well,(she's a Creative writing Professor), the story isn't interesting. I wish I could've seen her overcome some struggles or develop inner growth, yet she didn't, since she had the financial safety net of her parents. The poor little rich girl overtones became tiring.
**I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review,
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 4, 2014
Sigh.
I was so excited to read this book.
I entered a Goodreads giveaway for it - which I didn't win - I added it to my 'to read list', and then gleefully ended up receiving it as birthday gift. I was so pleased that I had a chance to read about this coming of age story in Paris, one of my favorite cities in the world.
Yeah, I should've lowered my expectations.
I thought this would be all about the cultural clashes and adaptation of an American girl to 1960s France...and it was, to a point. But what this really turned out to be, and what I did not sign up for, is a 'kiss and tell' memoir. 'I slept with this person, and this person, and this person. One of them had a small penis and the other was like my father.' That wasn't an actual quote, just a general gist of what the book was like.
It was well written and when it discussed Paris and France it was really good. But then the author would start going on about her parents back home or the latest lover she'd taken - none of whom she ever really seemed to like - and I would just end up audibly sighing to myself.
I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination and there is room enough in this world for memoirs of all kind for all people. I just didn't think that this one was for me.
I was so excited to read this book.
I entered a Goodreads giveaway for it - which I didn't win - I added it to my 'to read list', and then gleefully ended up receiving it as birthday gift. I was so pleased that I had a chance to read about this coming of age story in Paris, one of my favorite cities in the world.
Yeah, I should've lowered my expectations.
I thought this would be all about the cultural clashes and adaptation of an American girl to 1960s France...and it was, to a point. But what this really turned out to be, and what I did not sign up for, is a 'kiss and tell' memoir. 'I slept with this person, and this person, and this person. One of them had a small penis and the other was like my father.' That wasn't an actual quote, just a general gist of what the book was like.
It was well written and when it discussed Paris and France it was really good. But then the author would start going on about her parents back home or the latest lover she'd taken - none of whom she ever really seemed to like - and I would just end up audibly sighing to myself.
I'm not a prude by any stretch of the imagination and there is room enough in this world for memoirs of all kind for all people. I just didn't think that this one was for me.
December 9, 2013
Breathless: An American Girl in Paris belongs on the next incarnation of the “Twenty Books to Read in Your Twenties.” At once a riveting narrative and touching memoir, it captures that feeling that most girls in their twenties will relate to—that feeling of desperately trying to become who you’re supposed to become, while tripping over all your best intentions with every step and falling flat on your face.
Read my entire review here: http://www.thewhynottblog.com/book-re...
Read my entire review here: http://www.thewhynottblog.com/book-re...
May 14, 2014
Unfortunately I just could not get into this book at all. The story started off pretty fast and could have benefited from additional character analysis or even discussion. I felt like i was reading book two of a three part series and I missed the entire development. I didn't end up sympathizing with the character or the story as much as I maybe should have. Perhaps it is a generational thing but I would have loved more discussion of the times and less the affairs.
December 31, 2017
This coming of age memoir of a newly graduated American girl in the 1960s who rebels against middle class expectations and
runs away to Paris should have spoken to me, but I found her story to
be so self-absorbed, so full of bad choices to shock her parents, I wanted to shake her and say, "GROW UP".
runs away to Paris should have spoken to me, but I found her story to
be so self-absorbed, so full of bad choices to shock her parents, I wanted to shake her and say, "GROW UP".
July 2, 2021
A memoir of an American Jewish girl who moves to Paris to be free from her controlling and judgmental (but money-giving) parents and live a creative and exciting life. It's very soul-searching but ultimately I thought it was boring. She kept making horrible choices in men and then lamented them. She kept arguing with her parents but then took their financial help. I wanted to say...enough is enough. Either grow up and be totally independent or move back to New York and into familiar territory. I did find all the little tidbits about French culture fascinating.
June 24, 2018
I had high hopes for this book. I mean, an American young woman moves to Paris in the early 60s to study and get out from under her parents' thumbs and live—what a great premise. And yet, she ends up living pretty much the same pedestrian life in Paris that she would have had she stayed in the states. A disappointment.
December 8, 2018
I barely tolerated this and skimmed the back half. There was little plot and just nothing to grasp into. I was bored by this book. Paris is one of my favorite places and I’d love to go to Italy and Tunisia but the author just skins and dances around in a blasé, boring, meandering way and never DOES anything. Ugh. Annoyed I wasted my time.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 19, 2024
Very interesting reading! Hard to believe that this is all a true story! I thought this book would be about Paris but she hardly talks about Paris! This book is rather about all of the men she was involved with! Gratefully she found herself towards the end of this memoir and faded forwards to today when all of her ex-lovers and ex-husband have died. It is a poignant read!
April 21, 2019
Who hasn't been young and dreamed of escape to an exotic destination and an idyllic marriage? This biography is an honest look at disillusionment and the more wholesome and authentic (if less idealized) life we can lead when we trade the life we are told to have for the life we are meant to have.
July 26, 2018
Very easy to read and quite fascinating to read about a life so different from my own. But the francophilia and finding herself through the companionship of men really began to wear me down.
June 15, 2014
Most of the time I spent reading this book, I was mentally yelling at the author for the stupid choices she kept making! I know it was the 60s, early in the decade, and things were different -- but she had all of Paris at her feet and, rather than strike out independently, she settled for the worst possible men to throw herself on. I couldn't figure out why she felt she *had* to have these men. It seemed like she just wanted the drama of a relationship, a fling, but then she kept hanging on to the lovers (who were really poor lovers, at that) long after the time she should have left them. She so badly wanted to not be a daughter fulfilling her parents wishes for her, but she was desperately seeking marriage and any man would do. I was so disgusted with her! I finished the book and I'm still flabbergasted at her stupidity. She was in PARIS. She was living in Paris, supporting herself with her own brains ... I feel like she had the world at her feet, she was so brave just going there on her own ... and she tossed it all aside for these men, whom she slept with without enjoying it, but felt obligated to do so anyway. In addition to her neediness, she seemed to feel that if a man invited her for dinner, she was therefore expected to give him sex. She could have been a real force in Paris, an American girl fluent in Parisian ways, articulate and clever ... and she just buried herself in stupid men who condescended to her and left her unfulfilled in every possible way.
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
I don't think she loved either man she wound up with, B. or J. She didn't love them, but she seemed to need to be a part of a couple, no matter how stupid, selfish, and phony the man was. There was one point I actually almost stopped reading -- when she wound up pregnant, after she had gone to all the trouble to go to another country to get a diaphragm. She didn't use the diaphragm because her imbecilic boyfriend "didn't like the thought of it." So she wound up pregnant, had an abortion, and was never able to have children after that. I couldn't believe how meek and pliable she was with these men. So irritating!
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
SPOILER ALERT
I don't think she loved either man she wound up with, B. or J. She didn't love them, but she seemed to need to be a part of a couple, no matter how stupid, selfish, and phony the man was. There was one point I actually almost stopped reading -- when she wound up pregnant, after she had gone to all the trouble to go to another country to get a diaphragm. She didn't use the diaphragm because her imbecilic boyfriend "didn't like the thought of it." So she wound up pregnant, had an abortion, and was never able to have children after that. I couldn't believe how meek and pliable she was with these men. So irritating!
May 29, 2014
Nancy K. Miller’s recent memoir, Breathless: An American Girl in Paris, about her early years in 1960’s Paris seems an unlikely work by a renowned feminist scholar and Distinguished Professor of Literature at CUNY Graduate Center. The title itself, with its reference to “girl” and to Jean Luc Godard’s 1960 film, certainly does not convey a feminist viewpoint. But Godard’s Breathless, a unique French New Wave film for that time, was a definitive break from previous films with its focus on the beauty of Paris and youthful Jean Seberg, and the self-confident swagger of Jean Paul Belmondo.
Ms. Miller first saw Godard’s film when she was in her early 20’s. As a new Barnard College graduate, she wanted to break away from her New York “nice-Jewish-girl” life. So she sailed to France to study French literature, her “hedge against the Marjorie Morningstar destiny that haunted American girls in the 1950’s and into the ‘60’s: marriage to a successful man and then the suburbs with children.” She imagined herself living as an independent, sophisticated, sexy young woman in the nouvelle vague Paris she knew from French films, in particular Jean Seberg’s character in Breathless.
Breathless: An American Girl in Paris is a coming-of-age story of a budding feminist that moves to Paris during the volatile 1960's. Ms. Miller's experiences encompass her sexual awakening during the early 'free love' days, forming lasting friendships, working towards a masters degree in French literature, teaching English and literature, earning a Fullbright award, and embarking upon a disastrous marriage that ends painfully. Her time in Paris ends, and she returns to New York. Ultimately, her youthful,sometimes picaresque, experiences in Europe during an interesting time somehow eventually lead her to a distinguished career as a renowned feminist and literature professor.
Ms. Miller first saw Godard’s film when she was in her early 20’s. As a new Barnard College graduate, she wanted to break away from her New York “nice-Jewish-girl” life. So she sailed to France to study French literature, her “hedge against the Marjorie Morningstar destiny that haunted American girls in the 1950’s and into the ‘60’s: marriage to a successful man and then the suburbs with children.” She imagined herself living as an independent, sophisticated, sexy young woman in the nouvelle vague Paris she knew from French films, in particular Jean Seberg’s character in Breathless.
Breathless: An American Girl in Paris is a coming-of-age story of a budding feminist that moves to Paris during the volatile 1960's. Ms. Miller's experiences encompass her sexual awakening during the early 'free love' days, forming lasting friendships, working towards a masters degree in French literature, teaching English and literature, earning a Fullbright award, and embarking upon a disastrous marriage that ends painfully. Her time in Paris ends, and she returns to New York. Ultimately, her youthful,sometimes picaresque, experiences in Europe during an interesting time somehow eventually lead her to a distinguished career as a renowned feminist and literature professor.
December 13, 2013
Nancy K. Miller paints the perfect picture of absolute privilege in Paris. Her memoir of her young days spent in Paris in the 60′s as an ingenue, student, lover, and later wife, tells itself as a story of self-imposed exile from her New York home, overbearing parents, and “good girl” Jewish persona. Nancy Miller takes us through her adventures and misadventures, lovers, pregnancy scares and bouts of depression, all the while still enamored with a world of Hermès scarves, coffee at Simone de Beauvoir’s favourite cafe, and recited lines from A Bout de Souffle, and Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Miller candidly describes the costs of trying to live the life of the American Parisian, always desperate to become the essence of Jean Seberg.
I took on this memoir because I am really missing Paris – about a year ago today I was walking along on Île de France, taking in the wintry (mostly rainy) splendor of Paris at Christmas. Already I knew when I opened this book how almost silly and pretentious it was, I wanted to read it anyway thinking on my own romantic inclinations about Paris, my own shallow dreams of wearing a Hermès scarf, reading about the “Lost Generation” on the bank of the Seine, hopefully capturing a Jean-Seberg-essence. Miller’s indulgences in this memoir are my indulgences.
Although I was very appreciative that this was a fairly breezy book to read, I was a little saddened that it was more so about the drama of Miller’s own life, and less about the essence of Paris in the 60′s. But…. at the same time I can’t say that I was totally surprised – after all this is a story about an American girl in Paris, and as much as I am really annoyed by her complete self-absorption, I feel it’s authenticity and refusal to apologize are what makes it worth the afternoon I spent reading it.
I took on this memoir because I am really missing Paris – about a year ago today I was walking along on Île de France, taking in the wintry (mostly rainy) splendor of Paris at Christmas. Already I knew when I opened this book how almost silly and pretentious it was, I wanted to read it anyway thinking on my own romantic inclinations about Paris, my own shallow dreams of wearing a Hermès scarf, reading about the “Lost Generation” on the bank of the Seine, hopefully capturing a Jean-Seberg-essence. Miller’s indulgences in this memoir are my indulgences.
Although I was very appreciative that this was a fairly breezy book to read, I was a little saddened that it was more so about the drama of Miller’s own life, and less about the essence of Paris in the 60′s. But…. at the same time I can’t say that I was totally surprised – after all this is a story about an American girl in Paris, and as much as I am really annoyed by her complete self-absorption, I feel it’s authenticity and refusal to apologize are what makes it worth the afternoon I spent reading it.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 19, 2013
I received a copy of this memoir from the publishers and appreciate their kindness.
At the age of 57 I went to Paris for the first time and was utterly bowled over by its beauty. I do understand Miller's infatuation with the city of light. What is so foreign to me is her filtering every experience of Paris through the lens of either literature or films that she thought defined the "French" experience. It was as if she was unable to trust her own experiences as real unless they were compared to those she'd read about. And, man, did she ever have experiences!
Miller said she was desperate to shed her "nice-Jewish-girl self and her nice Jewish parents" when she arrived in Paris.
So, the first thing she's lured into doing is sleeping with a nice married friend of the family who finds her not quite ready for a passionate affair. She continues sleeping with a string of unsuitable lovers throughout the book and even goes so far as to marry one. All this activity is underscored by her love of French new wave movies, literature and philosophy. One feels like she was so busy comparing her actual life to scripted roles that she never was able to really inhabit a life of her own.
Having not grown up in the '60's, I found it hard to understand the frisson of living with two competing lifestyles, a nice Jewish girl vs. a liberated Jewish girl. I think Miller does accurately describe a young woman's desire to please her parents while moving to adulthood, often very contradictory in nature.
At the age of 57 I went to Paris for the first time and was utterly bowled over by its beauty. I do understand Miller's infatuation with the city of light. What is so foreign to me is her filtering every experience of Paris through the lens of either literature or films that she thought defined the "French" experience. It was as if she was unable to trust her own experiences as real unless they were compared to those she'd read about. And, man, did she ever have experiences!
Miller said she was desperate to shed her "nice-Jewish-girl self and her nice Jewish parents" when she arrived in Paris.
So, the first thing she's lured into doing is sleeping with a nice married friend of the family who finds her not quite ready for a passionate affair. She continues sleeping with a string of unsuitable lovers throughout the book and even goes so far as to marry one. All this activity is underscored by her love of French new wave movies, literature and philosophy. One feels like she was so busy comparing her actual life to scripted roles that she never was able to really inhabit a life of her own.
Having not grown up in the '60's, I found it hard to understand the frisson of living with two competing lifestyles, a nice Jewish girl vs. a liberated Jewish girl. I think Miller does accurately describe a young woman's desire to please her parents while moving to adulthood, often very contradictory in nature.
November 13, 2013
Firstly, thank you to the publishers for sending me a copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
BREATHLESS is one of those books you wished you'd read when you were 17 and absorbed all the lessons Miller imparts. Except, you know you never would have paid the tiniest bit of notice to trials she goes through/puts herself through, and instead marvelled at the idea of escaping to Paris in the 60s.
Reading this on the other side of 20, all I can do is cringe with a sense of shared experience. It's incredible the things we put ourselves through in our desperation to be fit our life into an idea/l, rather than living a life of our own. The naive approach to sex ('oh this is going to happen.... I don't suppose I fancy him that much, but hey maybe he will help me discover something about myself sexually.... oh no, that was just crap.') was particularly easy to identify with.
Miller writes with a sense of honesty recounting her experiences from the ages of 20-26 that reminds you how life is merry-go-round of stories that just go round and round, repeating, referencing, with characters popping up again and again. She captures what it was like to live in an iconic era simply by looking at the everyday challenges of money, plumbing and loneliness.
I really enjoyed this book and thank Miller for sharing her story.
BREATHLESS is one of those books you wished you'd read when you were 17 and absorbed all the lessons Miller imparts. Except, you know you never would have paid the tiniest bit of notice to trials she goes through/puts herself through, and instead marvelled at the idea of escaping to Paris in the 60s.
Reading this on the other side of 20, all I can do is cringe with a sense of shared experience. It's incredible the things we put ourselves through in our desperation to be fit our life into an idea/l, rather than living a life of our own. The naive approach to sex ('oh this is going to happen.... I don't suppose I fancy him that much, but hey maybe he will help me discover something about myself sexually.... oh no, that was just crap.') was particularly easy to identify with.
Miller writes with a sense of honesty recounting her experiences from the ages of 20-26 that reminds you how life is merry-go-round of stories that just go round and round, repeating, referencing, with characters popping up again and again. She captures what it was like to live in an iconic era simply by looking at the everyday challenges of money, plumbing and loneliness.
I really enjoyed this book and thank Miller for sharing her story.
November 8, 2013
Breathless is a memoir written by a young American woman who moves to Paris in the 1960s to try to figure out who she is and what she should do with her life. It was interesting to read about what life was like in Paris in those days, but I wasn't a huge fan of the author's style of writing. There was a sort of detachment for most of the memoir, as if she watched these things happen to someone else, rather than a description of her own life. Maybe that was a mirror of the way she felt at the time-- like things just happened to her, or she let things happen to herself, that she didn't necessarily want. This seemed to be especially true of her encounters with men. Overall, I'd recommend it, but I didn't love it as much as I thought I would based on the topic.
Favorite quote from the book: "An existence with no time for feeling was what I wanted. 'I must stay busy,' I underlined in my diary, 'or havoc sets in.'"
Favorite quote from the book: "An existence with no time for feeling was what I wanted. 'I must stay busy,' I underlined in my diary, 'or havoc sets in.'"
February 25, 2014
I read this book about a week after returning from Paris and was engrossed in the details Nancy Miller offers about Paris in the 1960s. I could visualize her life there and also enjoyed following along on her many doomed romantic escapades (it was the 60s, after all). The one she ended up with the longest had disaster written all over him from the beginning and I hated to see her go down that path, but of course we have all made mistakes in life and love -- especially in our 20s. Her love for Paris and her journey to find herself was, to me, extremely absorbing and interesting, and I found that I wanted to hear more!
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January 3, 2015 This book does what a memoir should do. Miller doesn't hold back and reveals some fairly personal and gritty details about her youth in Paris. I didn't keep careful track of the boyfriends and lovers but there were plenty. I admired her courage to make a life there when she was so young, from a protective family and there were none of the technology safety nets that we have today. Her father would have preferred that she marry well and raise a family but I have a feeling he was enormously proud of her. I have since read that the author is ill. As long as she writes, I'll keep reading. (less)
March 20, 2014
I did not know this was a memoir when I started reading. I picked it because I am planning a trip to Paris and wanted to read books set in the city. While it gave a nice glimpse of French culture in the 60s and was an interesting journey - I was frustrated by her choices. She was searching for independence from her parents but at the same time seeking their approval and finding out she was turning back toward them.
May 15, 2014
This memoir about Miller’s time in Paris during the 1960’s is a quick, delightful, melancholy read. She writes about trying to reconcile her glamorous ideas of Paris with the less-than-glamorous reality and much of the book contains her painfully honest accounts about her various romantic liaisons. Miller doesn’t gloss over her life or her relationships and it makes for a fascinating memoir that reads almost like a novel.
October 24, 2016
I'm not sure why this book has such a low rating on here: It's a frothy and mostly fun read of the constant stumbling blocks in your mid-20s. Yes, Nancy's chaotic time comes from a place of privilege getting to gallivant around Paris, but her privilege doesn't come across as snooty or air-headed--it's just the hand she was dealt.
This is a good book to read while traveling--it goes by quickly and is wildly entertaining.
This is a good book to read while traveling--it goes by quickly and is wildly entertaining.
November 19, 2013
I received an advanced reading copy from NetGalley.
I love everything '60s. The hives, the Beatles, and rock n' roll misfits. Sixties fashion is classy. What I learned from this book is live life to the fullest and learn from mistakes.
Paris, how can you resist Paris?
This coming-of-age memoir surely taught us a lesson. I found some parts a bit boring but this book is still entertaining.
I love everything '60s. The hives, the Beatles, and rock n' roll misfits. Sixties fashion is classy. What I learned from this book is live life to the fullest and learn from mistakes.
Paris, how can you resist Paris?
This coming-of-age memoir surely taught us a lesson. I found some parts a bit boring but this book is still entertaining.
November 27, 2015
I'll read just about anything that makes me feel like I'm living vicariously in France. I enjoyed the specific depiction of life in France for a single girl in the 50's and 60's. It's easy to romanticize living abroad, but another thing entirely to make it your life. I did enjoy dreaming about going back, but there were definitely times I wished she would get to the point.
January 12, 2014
It started off very good, but eventually I found the book to be more about Miller's failed relationships and struggles around wanting to free herself from her family's influence than about her life in Paris in particular.
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