Find Paris Was Ours Constructed By Penelope Rowlands Shown In Document

love Paris! This book ofessays fromwriters onimpressions of Paris is a must read for all Francophiles, There is the good, the delicious, the funny, the frustrating, the maddening, all within these pages: the small apartments, upbringing of children, the twinkling Eiffel Tower, romances, all here! Enjoy! "I knew already that living in Paris would not be like visiting Paris, but I hadn't appreciated what that really meant.
My previous trips to France had lasted days or weeks and had been marked by an epiphany at some museum or cathedral and a lot of feel good time at sidewalk cafes or strolls in the long summer twilight.
Vacation syndrome is dangerously seductive, You actually believe that this magical place you have come to allows you to be the connected, stressfree person that you really are.
There's a lot of vacation syndrome in Paris, "

The above quotation, excerpted from Walter Wells' Becoming a Parisian, is one of my favorites from this book and is illustrative of the the overarching theme captured in many of these essays: that Paris is a hard city.
Many of us have dreams of living as expats in Paris, myself included, but this essay collection further cultivated my sense that Paris is a city that doesn't bend or make amends.
It won't welcome you with open arms, It's too proud for that, And yet for a city and people so proud, we know that Paris today suffers from issues of security, racism, and a burgeoning immigrant population that is pushed from the the city's cultural heart to the rundown and overcrowded suburbs.
It takes a special person to want to live in Paris as an outsider, Not only must you want it enough to accept Parisians and French ways, you must be willing to accept its contradictions, whose significance is here heightened because they are what we least expected to find in the city of light.


I have been to Paris twice, My first memory of Paris is not actually of the city itself but of a fleeting vision I had as a fifteen year old just landed at Charles de Gualle, being conveyed away by bus via a dull highway that seemed to highlight only the poor and trashridden immigrant neighborhoods surrounding the city.
It was a cold, gray day in late March, much akin to the colorless Parisian winter months described by some of the authors in the book.
At last, peeking through the clouds I caught a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower I felt the tinge of excitement that had brought me to Paris as I joined my classmates in the scramble to take lowquality photos of an image that was already fading from view.
So Paris was wonderful after all, Even so, it was a sad first encounter, I felt sad for the contradictions of everything I thought I knew about Paris, sad for the people living those contradictions, and sad mostly because I was being conveyed away from it all this wonderful, perplexing city.


Paris is a good place to fall in love, but it is also a good place to be lonely, as many of the writers here stress.
Paris may be a good place to be a woman of color, as Josephine Baker and later Janet Macdonald, as she recounts here in her essay titled Just Another American, discovered for themselves, but it is also a place where in light of France's colonial legacy and recent world events you are scrutinized by your cultural practices.
It is a fun and flirtatious place to be a young woman, but also a place whose culture precipitates conflicting expectations about how women should act.
Two of my favorite essays were about young women who sought through Paris to discover their confidence, but whose conclusions are far from the stuff of feelgood travel memoirs, instead showing them as failures in their endeavor, confused.


All of this in more was put into my head while reading this book, and all of these stories gave layers to a city that, like the Eiffel Tower I saw peeking through the clouds on that gray March day, is shrouded in myth and expectation.
The truth of this book is that the reality of a city doesn't truly exist, We all live it differently, But perhaps the essence of it is to be found somewhere in between,

I agree that some

of these essays are outdated but still worth reading, And no, I haven't found Parisians to be as snobby and unyielding as they are often portrayed here,

Bonne Lecture!

H, I must admit that I really really like anthologies, Previously I had steered clear of them because something snobbish on the inside told me that in order for a book to be truly worthwhile reading, it needed to be conquered and dominated.
But anthologies allow for a true enjoyment of reading that is not ambitious,

Of course there were some testimonies I liked less but these were over soon enough and others I liked lots Caroline Weber, Joe Queenan who provided my favourite line "a muttonfaced cop stuck his head out the window and told him to cease and desist and get the fuck down", David Sedaris, Janine De Giovanni, C.
K. Williams, Lily Tuck, Richard Armstrong, Noelle Oxenhandler, Marcelle Clements, David Lebovitz and yes that is a small selection, The topics were varied but at the same time entirely the same, It seems that Paris' identity and personality is a real and tangible thing, As with most collections there were stories in this that I enjoyed and others that I did not, That being said I think the collection is a fairly good representation of the joys and trials that come with living in Paris.


Most people will probably think that this will be a glowing depiction of the city and written mainly for people who already have an obsessive love of the city even if they haven't lived there or been there.
Paris Was Ours is more of an honest account from different writers and their experiences of the city, Some focus on the city itself, while others focus on their own lives and just happen to be in Paris,

Overall, this collection is worth a look if you're a reader interested in Parisian life, I love Paris. There's no doubt about it, I dream of living and getting into a routine in the City of Light, When I came across Paris Was Ours in a bookstore, I just had to read it,
The book is comprised of essays fromauthors, It's an interesting format because it tells stories from distinct perspectives, including that of a homeless blogger, Not all Parisian adventures are romantic some are pedestrian, some are stressful, and some are downright humiliating, The variety of experiences do share a common theme Paris is a city that permanently shapes its inhabitants, and as one of the authors said, you might leave Paris, but you'll never get Paris out of your head.

An added bonus to this enjoyable book I discovered many new authors to follow! Reading this wonderful book made me homesick for Paris, even though I've visited the city of lighttimes betweenand.

In ca.chapters/short stories different mostly American authors tell their Paris story,
Most of them were young when they spent a year or two or more in Paris,
Many of the stories take place in the's and's, a few are newer, The book is from.

I usually don't care for short stories, but this one was very rewarding,

For further Paris reading I can highly recommend "We always had Paris, . . and Provence" by Patricia and Walter Wells and Julia Childs' book on her years in Paris, .