Susan Conley's Blog
May 6, 2014
Paris Is Always A Good Idea: Voyage Into A Great Book!
A Blog Post By Vicki Lesage
Books about Paris are a surefire hit - from romance to mystery to intrigue, what better way to fantasize about Paris than reading a book about it, preferably over a glass of Bordeaux? I've hand-picked a selection of French-themed books below and to help you decide which ones fit your style, I've asked each author a few questions. Read their responses and check out their books!
Becoming Josephine
by Heather Webb
Why is your book a "good idea" for someone who loves Paris? Becoming Josephine is about a famous and beloved French historical figure and much of the novel takes place in Paris.
Which scene might raise a few eyebrows? One of the scenes set during the September Massacres, also, perhaps one of the hotter scenes between Napoleon and Josephine.
Genre: Historical Fiction, Women's Fiction. Buy now or read the book's description:
Print: $15.00 www.amazon.com/dp/0142180653/
Kindle: $7.99 www.amazon.com/dp/B00DMCV2SC
Connect with Heather: Website / Facebook / Twitter
Je T'Aime, Me Neither
by April Lily Heise
Why is your book a "good idea" for someone who loves Paris? Paris is almost a character in my book rather than the setting, perhaps a coy antagonist? I'd like to think that the passion of Paris was a root of most of my romantic misadventures, but I can't blame it all on Paris!
Who would absolutely hate your book? Readers looking for an idealized story of Paris. Truth is more interesting than fiction, but reality can clash with some people's dreams of perfect Paris.
Genre: Memoir. Buy now or read the book's description:
Print: $13.49 www.amazon.com/dp/0992005302
Kindle: $6.99 www.amazon.com/dp/B00DAI30I8
Connect with Lily: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads
Gastien: The Cost of a Dream
by Caddy Rowland
If your book was a drink, what would it be? If The Gastien Series was a drink, it would be absinthe, of course! That was the preferred drink of the bohemian artists of nineteenth century Paris. Strong, beautiful and mind-altering, the "green fairy" is a drink that forges its own path, daring to be different.
Who would absolutely hate your book? People who don't like dark, raw, gritty, emotional, and - at times - brutal stories would hate my book. I don't write "pretty" stories, I write about the sublime joy and bitter tragedy of being human. That doesn't guarantee "happy" but it does guarantee "real".
Genre: Historical Fiction, Family Saga, Drama. Buy now or read the book's description:
Print: $14.99 www.amazon.com/dp/1492890391
Kindle: $4.99 www.amazon.com/dp/B005FI62BS
Connect with Caddy: Blog / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads
Paris, Rue des Martyrs
by Adria J. Cimino
Why is your book a "good idea" for someone who loves Paris?
It will transport you to the Paris of Parisians... You won't feel as if you have vacationed in Paris, but as if you have lived there.
If your book was a drink, what would it be?
Cafe au lait: Bitter and sweet, dark and light... Opposites come together, creating unforgettable flavor!
Genre: Contemporary Fiction. Buy now or read the book's description:
Kindle: $3.99 www.amazon.com/dp/B00IAY344W
Connect with Adria:
Website / Blog / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads
Confessions of a Paris Party Girl
by Vicki Lesage
If your book was a drink, what would it be?
A glass of red wine - classy but accessible. You want to share it with friends and you have fun drinking it.
Which scene might raise a few eyebrows?
The airplane vomit story, for sure. Or maybe the passing-out-on-the-bathroom-floor story. If you enjoy drinking, this might make you stop. If you don't drink, you can smugly watch me learn my lesson. I do eventually grow up, it just takes a while.
Genre: Memoir. Buy now or read the book's description:
Print: $14.99 www.amazon.com/dp/1494701529
Kindle: $4.99 www.amazon.com/dp/0992005302
Connect with Vicki:
Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads
I see London, I see France
by Paulita Kincer
If your book was a drink, what would it be? An Absinthe Chocolate Cocktail. Traveling with three kids while figuring out if a marriage is worth saving brings some definite worries, thus the absinthe to help forget those worries. And the chocolate, well that makes everything better, right?
Which scene might raise a few eyebrows? Some of the scenes in my novel are hot, but they don't get into graphic details of slot a fitted into slot b. What might raise some eyebrows would be Caroline, the main character's, realization that she may have some prejudices. She rolls around the beach in Nice and is certain she is ready to break her marriage vows to have sex with a sensual gypsy man (think Johnny Depp). She leads him up to her hotel room and realizes she's never been inside a building with the man. She only pictures him outdoors. And the prejudice of the hotel clerk plants doubt in her mind. Most middle class Americans have trouble admitting they may have prejudices.
Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction. Buy now or read the book's description:
Print: $14.00 www.amazon.com/dp/1304698882
Kindle: $4.99 www.amazon.com/dp/B00HBY90M2
Connect with Paulita: Website
Paris Was The Place
by Susan Conley
Why is your book a "good idea" for someone who loves Paris? At times Paris Was the Place is like a guided walking tour of Paris. You get to eat delicious crepes, hear some good jazz music, drink red wine and fall in love.
Which scene might raise a few eyebrows? When narrator Willie Pears falls for a Frenchman she meets in Paris, she jumps in his truck and heads to the South of France. It's a drive that turns out to be one long roadtrip of foreplay.
Genres: Fiction, Women's Fiction. Buy now or read the book's description:
Print: $26.95 www.amazon.com/dp/0307594076
Kindle: $10.99 www.amazon.com/dp/B00BVJG4CM
Connect with Susan: Website / Facebook / Twitter
The Paris Game
by Alyssa Linn Palmer
Why is your book a "good idea" for someone who loves Paris? It's an especially good idea if you're fond of late night jazz, or wandering the streets of the Left Bank. That's where I focused most of the story.
If your book was a drink, what would it be? Something quite strong, whiskey on the rocks.
Which scene might raise a few eyebrows? The entirety of chapter one.
Genres: Mystery, Romance, Suspense. Buy now or read the book's description:
Print: $15.95 www.amazon.com/dp/1484834828
Kindle: $4.99 www.amazon.com/dp/B00DCJYXIQ
Connect with Alyssa: Website / Facebook / Twitter / Goodreads
December 12, 2013
Interview with Printsasia
Let’s start with an easy one, What are you currently reading and which books you have reread many times in your life?
I am currently reading Colum McCann’s new novel Transatlantic. I have been known to re-read the essays of Joan Didion many times in my life so far (The White Album) in particular. I also go back to Virginia Woolf a lot and re-read Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse for the experimental, fluid prose she was inventing on the page. I also really enjoy the intricate novels of Colim Toibin and have read some of his novels several times.
How did you come up with the idea of setting your novel in Paris? Do you have any personal history with Paris?
I lived in Paris in the late 1980′s, and I really wanted to capture that time and place in my novel. I wanted Paris to come alive on the page, almost as if the city was a whole separate character in the novel. I felt I understood some aspects of what Paris was like in 1989, and I very much wanted my protagonist, Willow, to have to grapple with what it’s like to be an outsider looking in.
Tell us something about the portrayal of the character Willie Pears. Is she related to you personally in some ways?
Willow, or Willie as she goes by, isn’t related to me really in any way. She is a fictive character who came to life on the page. My first inkling of her was when I imagined an American woman riding a train alone in France, and I realized that I wanted to write a novel about that woman. I wanted to understand what she was doing in France and what would happen if she fell in love and had to grieve the death of her mother and had to make very hard professional decisions about how much she could ever help any one student of hers.
Your book requires a great deal of research. Could you share those experiences you have had whilst conducting research for this book?
Living in Paris in the 1980′s was experiential research. Then I returned as a visitor to Paris in 2007, after which I spent more time traveling through France, which all really helped my work. In the United States I have had the honor of being a story writing teacher to different refugee teenagers through a writing center that I helped start with two other writer friends (www.thetellingroom.org). So I understood a lot of the components of what it means to try to teach storywriting to teenagers who have a very powerful and important story to tell. I also did a lot of research around the French judicial system and the intricacies of the French courts as well as the neighborhoods.
If you had one day to show someone around the city, what would be in the Susan Conley tour of Paris?
I think now that I’ve completed Paris Was the Place the tour would be a replica of the places Willie enjoys going in the novel: The Rodin Museum (pictured above), the Tuileries, the narrow, winding streets in the 6th arrondisement, the creperies along St. Germain des Pres, the gorgeous Parisian bridges and the walks along the Seine, the Luxembourg Gardens. But at every turn I would also encourage people on this tour to take time to go off the beaten track and explore unknown neighborhoods: try some Indian food in Brady Passage for example. Get lost in the alleyways around the Pantheon. Paris is such a vivid, fascinating city and is almost a world unto itself.
We would like to know something about your next book. What and when can we expect it?
My next book may follow in the footsteps of my first book and find itself set in China. My family and I lived in Beijing for close to three years from 2007-2010, and my memoir (The Foremost Good Fortune) traces our time there. Now I’d like to write a novel and Americans and Chinese–all friends living in Beijing who travel to a small town north of the city for the weekend. It’s meant to be a study in cultural intersection and perhaps a story about how people re-invent themselves when they are far from home.
What message do you want to convey to your readers?
I like to convey complex emotion to my readers. I like to render my characters in ways that show that the choices we make are never as simple as they may appear. I also like to give my readers the joy and the pleasure of being on the open road: meeting new people in the pages of my books, seeing new sites, eating delicious food. So much about my writing is about tracing the moments of real connection between one character and another. It’s my hope that this emotional connection is then transferred to the reader.
Read the original interview here. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
Interview with Printasia
Let’s start with an easy one, What are you currently reading and which books you have reread many times in your life?
I am currently reading Colum McCann’s new novel Transatlantic. I have been known to re-read the essays of Joan Didion many times in my life so far (The White Album) in particular. I also go back to Virginia Woolf a lot and re-read Mrs. Dalloway and To The Lighthouse for the experimental, fluid prose she was inventing on the page. I also really enjoy the intricate novels of Colim Toibin and have read some of his novels several times.
How did you come up with the idea of setting your novel in Paris? Do you have any personal history with Paris?
I lived in Paris in the late 1980′s, and I really wanted to capture that time and place in my novel. I wanted Paris to come alive on the page, almost as if the city was a whole separate character in the novel. I felt I understood some aspects of what Paris was like in 1989, and I very much wanted my protagonist, Willow, to have to grapple with what it’s like to be an outsider looking in.
Tell us something about the portrayal of the character Willie Pears. Is she related to you personally in some ways?
Willow, or Willie as she goes by, isn’t related to me really in any way. She is a fictive character who came to life on the page. My first inkling of her was when I imagined an American woman riding a train alone in France, and I realized that I wanted to write a novel about that woman. I wanted to understand what she was doing in France and what would happen if she fell in love and had to grieve the death of her mother and had to make very hard professional decisions about how much she could ever help any one student of hers.
Your book requires a great deal of research. Could you share those experiences you have had whilst conducting research for this book?
Living in Paris in the 1980′s was experiential research. Then I returned as a visitor to Paris in 2007, after which I spent more time traveling through France, which all really helped my work. In the United States I have had the honor of being a story writing teacher to different refugee teenagers through a writing center that I helped start with two other writer friends (www.thetellingroom.org). So I understood a lot of the components of what it means to try to teach storywriting to teenagers who have a very powerful and important story to tell. I also did a lot of research around the French judicial system and the intricacies of the French courts as well as the neighborhoods.
If you had one day to show someone around the city, what would be in the Susan Conley tour of Paris?
I think now that I’ve completed Paris Was the Place the tour would be a replica of the places Willie enjoys going in the novel: The Rodin Museum (pictured above), the Tuileries, the narrow, winding streets in the 6th arrondisement, the creperies along St. Germain des Pres, the gorgeous Parisian bridges and the walks along the Seine, the Luxembourg Gardens. But at every turn I would also encourage people on this tour to take time to go off the beaten track and explore unknown neighborhoods: try some Indian food in Brady Passage for example. Get lost in the alleyways around the Pantheon. Paris is such a vivid, fascinating city and is almost a world unto itself.
We would like to know something about your next book. What and when can we expect it?
My next book may follow in the footsteps of my first book and find itself set in China. My family and I lived in Beijing for close to three years from 2007-2010, and my memoir (The Foremost Good Fortune) traces our time there. Now I’d like to write a novel and Americans and Chinese–all friends living in Beijing who travel to a small town north of the city for the weekend. It’s meant to be a study in cultural intersection and perhaps a story about how people re-invent themselves when they are far from home.
What message do you want to convey to your readers?
I like to convey complex emotion to my readers. I like to render my characters in ways that show that the choices we make are never as simple as they may appear. I also like to give my readers the joy and the pleasure of being on the open road: meeting new people in the pages of my books, seeing new sites, eating delicious food. So much about my writing is about tracing the moments of real connection between one character and another. It’s my hope that this emotional connection is then transferred to the reader.
Read the original interview here. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons
September 21, 2013
Omnivoracious Interview
I love so many books about Paris. And I love them all equally. But I’ll start with Me Talk Pretty One Day because when David Sedaris tries to learn the intricacy of French verbs it makes me laugh so hard that I cry.
Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast comes next because this book always makes me want to fly to Paris and have a real meal in a street cafe. Soft cheeses. Filet of sole. Warm baguette. Flan and coffee. The novel has a style so immediate and intimate.
I can still read Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans out loud to myself at night very happily, even though my two boys are almost teenagers now and there’s no child in the room listening to me. There doesn’t need to be. Whenever I get to the appendix scene in the hospital, my heart skips.
The Paris in Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, is an entirely different version of the city: a city that’s vulnerable and battered and circled by the ghosts of families lost to the war. This is a beautiful novel.
Reading Marcel Proust’s entire In Search of Lost Time is like putting on someone else’s nostalgia and wearing it for thousands of pages. There’s no plotline, just a series of remembrances and how lovely is that: an ode to the fleeting mechanisms of memory.
When I first read Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon back in 1995, it was so compelling and transparent that I felt like I was there with him in the Tuileries, while he watched his daughter at the carousel. I wanted to live that life—to move to Paris. And so I did.
The Paris in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog is an upstairs/downstairs kind of city. This book is terrific and funny and so wise. It takes Parisians and all their fascinating, inscrutable cultural fetishes head on.
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer goes back to pre-World War II Paris and then takes us right up and through the war. This is a triumphant love story even though darkness lurks around every corner.
The Pleasing Hour by Lily King is about what happens when an American au pair lands in Paris. This book is a lovely dismantling of an entire French family’s ecosystem in evocative, sensual prose.
Then here at the end I go back to Hemingway and to romance. Because even though Paris is called the City of Lights, it could be called the City of Love on Ancient Bridges. People get more romantic in Paris. They just do. And all these books allow for that. There are moments in Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife when I feel like I’m seeing Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, up close, and it’s tantalizing—as if we’re there with them in Paris flirting and drinking wine. How great is that? The passage of time has erased nothing. Each of these books bridges the miles to Charles de Gaulle Airport and lands me somewhere near the Seine at a bustling street café where I get to go on a vacation of the mind.
This interview was originally published in Omnivoracious, a book blog run by Amazon.
Omnivoracious Interview
A funny thing happened after I wrote a novel starring Paris as the main character. All these other books about Paris began showing up at my book readings. People in the audience call them out during the question and answer period. Then everyone writes down the titles they haven’t heard of on the backs of shopping lists and paper napkins. It turns out that everyone has a favorite Paris novel or memoir (or two). What is it about that city?
I love so many books about Paris. And I love them all equally.
But I’ll start with Me Talk Pretty One Day because when David Sedaris tries to learn the intricacy of French verbs it makes me laugh so hard that I cry.
Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast comes next because this book always makes me want to fly to Paris and have a real meal in a street cafe. Soft cheeses. Filet of sole. Warm baguette. Flan and coffee. The novel has a style so immediate and intimate.
I can still read Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans out loud to myself at night very happily, even though my two boys are almost teenagers now and there’s no child in the room listening to me. There doesn’t need to be. Whenever I get to the appendix scene in the hospital, my heart skips.
The Paris in Irene Nemirovsky’s Suite Francaise, is an entirely different version of the city: a city that’s vulnerable and battered and circled by the ghosts of families lost to the war. This is a beautiful novel.
Reading Marcel Proust’s entire In Search of Lost Time is like putting on someone else’s nostalgia and wearing it for thousands of pages. There’s no plotline, just a series of remembrances and how lovely is that: an ode to the fleeting mechanisms of memory.
When I first read Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon back in 1995, it was so compelling and transparent that I felt like I was there with him in the Tuileries, while he watched his daughter at the carousel. I wanted to live that life—to move to Paris. And so I did.
The Paris in Muriel Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog is an upstairs/downstairs kind of city. This book is terrific and funny and so wise. It takes Parisians and all their fascinating, inscrutable cultural fetishes head on.
The Invisible Bridge by Julie Orringer goes back to pre-World War II Paris and then takes us right up and through the war. This is a triumphant love story even though darkness lurks around every corner.
The Pleasing Hour by Lily King is about what happens when an American au pair lands in Paris. This book is a lovely dismantling of an entire French family’s ecosystem in evocative, sensual prose.
Then here at the end I go back to Hemingway and to romance. Because even though Paris is called the City of Lights, it could be called the City of Love on Ancient Bridges. People get more romantic in Paris. They just do. And all these books allow for that. There are moments in Paula McClain’s The Paris Wife when I feel like I’m seeing Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson, up close, and it’s tantalizing—as if we’re there with them in Paris flirting and drinking wine. How great is that? The passage of time has erased nothing.
Each of these books bridges the miles to Charles de Gaulle Airport and lands me somewhere near the Seine at a bustling street café where I get to go on a vacation of the mind.
This interview was originally published in Omnivoracious, a book blog run by Amazon.
Photo credit: Pont Neuf Seine Paris France - Creative Commons by gnuckx
September 16, 2013
Book Jam Blog Interview
1.What three books have helped shape you into the author you are today, and why?
Joan Didion’s The White Album taught me that women could write about the same things that men could: rock and roll and politics and driving cars on the Santa Monica freeway. But that women could do something perhaps more interesting–they could layer on to that social inquiry a more internal, emotive investigation of what it means to be a mother or a sister or a daughter or a wife. Didion opened up the world of complex, nuanced, startling intimate creative non-fiction to me. Her novels are also lessons in compression and distillation and I have devoured all of those too.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace taught me about breadth and scope and the infinite possibilities of how to write about family. You may be able to tell I preferred the domestic chapters to the war chapters, but those battle scenes and schemes were extremely educational too. This book showed me how to write about the intricacies of place and how to use place as a full-blown character in my work–a portal into the story. This book is also so generous with its treatment of scenes. Tolstoy stays in the scenes for a long, long time. Much longer, in fact, than you think it’s possible to. And this is how he is able to fully render his character, until they come completely alive on the page and work their way into our hearts.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is on the list because this was the book that showed me how novels can spend all their time tracing their character’s shifting internal thoughts. Not much happens in this beautiful novel. It’s mostly the mapping of each character’s fluid, discursive inner thinking. Woolf showed me that it is rare that two characters in a novel (or in the world for that matter) are actually speaking to one another–actually exchanging ideas. And that most often they are pushing some kind of unseen and often unconscious agenda in their mind without even knowing it. Often they are lost in their own dreams and their own questions and musings. Then every so often, two people connect, as they do in quiet, powerful moments in To the Lighthouse and there’s great pathos and emotion.
2.What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?
Probably the esteemed Virginia Woolf. Because of her prolific career–so many novels and essays and letters and journals. But also because of her layered, complicated life and the crowd she hung out with. Her perch in the famed Bloomsbury art world in England and her famous sister Vanessa would make talking to Virginia even more fascinating. That is, if I could get her to talk. I have a feeling she would be rather circumspect and want to drink her coffee (or tea rather) and then go home.
3.What books are currently on your bedside table?
I will simply look at the pile, right next to the bed, and list them for you. There are always many and they all call to me: Richard Russo’s Elsewhere, Colum McCann’s Dancer, Pers Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time, Jane Gardam’s The Man in the Wooden Hat. Halldor Laxness’ Independent People. David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. (Sedaris is always on my bedside table. He keeps me honest and keeps me taking risks.)
Read the interview here!
The Book Jam
To coincide with my reading at the Norwich Bookstore on Wednesday, September 18th, I was interviewed by the great Book Jam Blog:
1.What three books have helped shape you into the author you are today, and why?
Joan Didion’s The White Album taught me that women could write about the same things that men could: rock and roll and politics and driving cars on the Santa Monica freeway. But that women could do something perhaps more interesting–they could layer on to that social inquiry a more internal, emotive investigation of what it means to be a mother or a sister or a daughter or a wife. Didion opened up the world of complex, nuanced, startling intimate creative non-fiction to me. Her novels are also lessons in compression and distillation and I have devoured all of those too.
Tolstoy’s War and Peace taught me about breadth and scope and the infinite possibilities of how to write about family. You may be able to tell I preferred the domestic chapters to the war chapters, but those battle scenes and schemes were extremely educational too. This book showed me how to write about the intricacies of place and how to use place as a full-blown character in my work–a portal into the story. This book is also so generous with its treatment of scenes. Tolstoy stays in the scenes for a long, long time. Much longer, in fact, than you think it’s possible to. And this is how he is able to fully render his character, until they come completely alive on the page and work their way into our hearts.
Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is on the list because this was the book that showed me how novels can spend all their time tracing their character’s shifting internal thoughts. Not much happens in this beautiful novel. It’s mostly the mapping of each character’s fluid, discursive inner thinking. Woolf showed me that it is rare that two characters in a novel (or in the world for that matter) are actually speaking to one another–actually exchanging ideas. And that most often they are pushing some kind of unseen and often unconscious agenda in their mind without even knowing it. Often they are lost in their own dreams and their own questions and musings. Then every so often, two people connect, as they do in quiet, powerful moments in To the Lighthouse and there’s great pathos and emotion.
2.What author (living or dead) would you most like to have a cup of coffee with and why?
Probably the esteemed Virginia Woolf. Because of her prolific career–so many novels and essays and letters and journals. But also because of her layered, complicated life and the crowd she hung out with. Her perch in the famed Bloomsbury art world in England and her famous sister Vanessa would make talking to Virginia even more fascinating. That is, if I could get her to talk. I have a feeling she would be rather circumspect and want to drink her coffee (or tea rather) and then go home.
3.What books are currently on your bedside table?
I will simply look at the pile, right next to the bed, and list them for you. There are always many and they all call to me: Richard Russo’s Elsewhere, Colum McCann’sDancer, Pers Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time, Jane Gardam’s The Man in the Wooden Hat. Halldor Laxness’ Independent People. David Sedaris’s Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. (Sedaris is always on my bedside table. He keeps me honest and keeps me taking risks.)
Read the interview here!
August 26, 2013
Book Notes Interview
This post originally appeared in the blog Largehearted Boy and the Book Notes series, where authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Read it here.
My new novel Paris Was the Place tries to capture this big, sudden, knock you off your feet kind of love affair in Paris between an American woman named Willie Pears, and Macon Ventri, a passionate, idealistic French immigration lawyer. I wanted to render this love as the kind that arrives out of nowhere and sort of blindsides you. In the case of my novel, it's a love that starts in the cramped hall of a teenage refugee center in the tenth arrondisement of Paris—the kind of love that leaves your breathless and then breaks into so many little pieces that Willie then has to work to put back together.
I went to Ray LaMontagne for the heart wrenching, gritty love songs that the novel needed underneath it. I had a bit of a repetitive spin cycle going with his song "Three More Days" off of the album Till the Sun Turns Black. It's a sexy song that has all this anticipation built into its chorus and its bridge. Willie and Macon have to wait to be together in the novel, and "Three More Days" kept helping me conjure that tension they both felt.
I'm not a big Coldplay fan really, but their song "Us Against the World" off the Mylo Xyloto album really also fit the mood I was after. In some ways Willie and Macon weren't meant to be together. There were cultural differences and ex-wives and a child all getting in the way of them, and yet they found a way to connect in a pick up truck driving to the south of France together. There's a simplicity to this one Coldplay song that I wanted to try to extend to all my characters in the novel—a sense of things becoming much more elemental and real. Willie and Macon are both deeply connected to the refugee center where they work—Willie as a volunteer teacher and Macon as an overworked lawyer, and this song "Us Against the World" also extends to contain all the teenage girls forced to live at the center, awaiting deportation.
David Torn's "End Credit Suite" off of the Lars and the Real Girl soundtrack is a song that could be played through many chapters of my novel. It's a simple, melodic piece without vocals that implies hope but also real tension. I think this whole soundtrack is stunning, but I go back to this suite when the characters in the book need to get really quiet and focused.
Madeleine Peyroux's "River of Tears" is another great love song that has a really simple structure that asked to be played multiple times on some writing days. With her Billie Holiday-esque smoky voice, Peyroux helped take me back to Paris each time I listened to her, and she became an essential on the play list.
Alexi Murdoch's song "All My Days" has a kind of timelessness to it and an underlying melancholy that I tried to translate into scenes in the novel where Willie's brother is sick and where Gita, the teenage refugee who Willie tries to help, decides to take drastic measures. There's a lot of travel and talk of travel in the book: subways and inter-continental plane rides and taxis and trucks and trains. And there's also a great deal of dislocation and a constant questioning of who belongs and why they belong and how they belong. "All My Days" has this retrospective quality to it that feels like it creates a nice backdrop for all that dislocation.
Sometimes I needed slightly dreamy, associative, melodic music and The Pines' Dark So Gold album was a nice choice, especially the song "All The While." I found myself trying to capture these understated male voices in the book, and this song really helped as a portal into that world. In contrast to all that quiet, Lisa Hannigan's song "Home" from the Passenger album is more explicitly emotional and has more of a driving intensity that rounds out the play list.
And then the final song would have to be Antje Duvekot's song "Sweet Spot" off her Live From All Over the Place album. This song is a celebration and a triumph and a piercing reminder to all the characters in the novel to live in the moment. It's a beautiful song and one that I think Willie and her brother Luke would both like, but for slightly different reasons. Whenever I hear this song, I feel gratitude and that's what I hope readers are left with when they finish Paris Was the Place—an understanding of the gratitude that Willie feels for having known Luke and having known Gita and for having loved Macon.
Photo credit: Wiki Commons
August 19, 2013
A Pact to Make the Heart Grow Fonder?
We were so certain of our strong connection that we could risk abstinence. We told ourselves we wanted to see how much the experiment would make us long for each other. Our sex had been the urgent, reckless kind you have in the kitchen before lunch because you can’t wait for the short walk to the bedroom.
The first time we kissed was at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning after jumping naked into a mountain lake. This is when I swooned for him.
He was tall and Slavic, looking like Pete Sampras with a beard. He played bass guitar and made hummus from scratch. He believed in love and austerity: only one pair of jeans, one old Ramones T-shirt. And no sex for a year.
Maybe our love was already fading and we didn’t want to admit it, so instead we schemed and saved until we could afford two open-ended multistop plane tickets. Then we flew to Southeast Asia, where our combined burn rate was $10 a day.
We landed in Hong Kong in sweltering heat and held hands on the crowded airport bus into Kowloon. We had waited so long for this, but I was nervous. I had never been to Asia before. I had never tried abstinence.
We found a cramped room on the seventh floor of a makeshift hotel run by a passel of chain-smoking Pakistani men who cooked rice over Sterno in the cramped lobby. That was where we had our first sex in a year.
I wish I could say it was worth the wait. Instead I felt guilty, partly because I could hear the Pakistani men down the hall saying evening prayers, and partly because I felt so distant, as if I didn’t know the words to our song anymore. I worried our experiment had done the opposite of what we had wanted, and we had no connection anymore.
Our next stop was the lush coast of Thailand, where Andrew stayed in the beach hut and tried to sit in the lotus position. He had only talked about meditation before, but now he read books on Buddhism and became quieter, going further inside himself.
It was the most modest spiritual journey: an overly serious 23-year-old man sitting on a dirt floor in Koh Samet trying to figure out what his life meant. The hitch was that he had brought a girl with him, a girl who lay on the beach alone, waiting to fall back into lust and wondering why it wasn’t happening faster.
We kissed that night under a cloud of mosquito netting. He had these sculptured cheekbones and an easy smile, and I was still so attracted to his dark eyes.
But we seemed self-conscious. I had believed that one of the greatest things in the world was how love grew and grew and opened. I didn’t understand yet that love could also shut down.
The next morning two middle-aged German men in tiny Speedos walked the beach with a thin teenage prostitute. The girl looked 14 — hair to her jaw and boyish in a yellow bikini.
The men swam out until the water was up to their necks. Then they tossed the girl back and forth in the air as if she were a beach ball. She screamed and laughed, and I felt lonelier than I ever had in my life.
In Delhi we took a train to Agra and slept in a dive hotel that only rented rooms with twin beds. We didn’t mind. We didn’t even try to have sex. Maybe we were becoming the unintended consequence of our experiment. Not having sex for that whole year made it easier to continue not having sex, all of which I took as a very bad sign.
In Agra we walked the Taj Mahal, then headed back to the hotel where Andrew meditated some more, and I lay in my metal bed having what seemed like my first existential breakdown. It was the hugeness of the Taj Mahal that tripped me up — that massive, marble testament to love.
I thought my love for Andrew was my belief system. Now I needed to find a new religion. The scary weight of that pinned me to the bed while I listened to the rickshaw drivers argue on the street.
But Andrew was good in a crisis; he got me to laugh at myself and persuaded me to get dressed and fly to Bali. From there we took a puddle-jumper to Lombok and a skiff to Elizabeth Gilbert Island, which was still called Gili Meno because she hadn’t been there yet.
There was no electricity or running water, just one-room shacks on a beach and a fire pit with a grate. Here Andrew grew even more remote. But this was also where he used the word “marriage” and implied it would be us marrying. Which surprised me, because he wasn’t talking a lot by then. I still believed in the infinite possibilities of love, so maybe marriage, I thought, would be the thing to cement us.
The couple staying in the shack next to us, Simon and Margaret, told us they loved each other so much, they wanted to be the same person. This meant they wore the same red Hawaiian shirt, same red cotton shorts and same sport sandals. Hundreds of people like them lived together in the mountains north of Denver, Simon said, all wearing matching clothes and eating identical food and trying a mind meld.
“Don’t call it a cult,” Margaret said to me with a forced a smile. “I know what you’re thinking. But we’re more than that.”
What I was thinking was that love can make people do strange things, and so can the fear of losing love. I was also realizing that Andrew and I were never going to be the same person. In Asia I saw how different we were. For starters, I couldn’t even meditate. What I wanted to do was climb out of my head and find some cold beer and meet people.
The next morning Margaret and Simon argued in their shack because Simon had eaten a homemade cinnamon bun at breakfast and hadn’t told her. “You snuck it,” she accused him. “You snuck the bun and you lied.”
Their kind of love made me tired. I asked Andrew what our kind of love was. He said he wasn’t sure but that it was probably a good love.
I was 22. I wanted to hear that we had the most passionate and intuitive love in the history of the universe, even if it wasn’t true. More and more I felt as if I didn’t understand Andrew, especially when he began making drawings of Jesus in his journal and wondering aloud whether he was a real person.
I needed to find some other people to talk to who weren’t from a cult in Colorado. I walked around the island in 60 minutes and decided I needed to go home.
The next day we found a boat back to Lombok. Margaret and Simon waved goodbye from the beach, both dressed in purple T-shirts and dark purple shorts.
On our last night in Bali we met an Australian zookeeper at our guesthouse. He had a beard as long as Andrew’s and a small bag of Thai marijuana. When the zookeeper and I went to smoke in the garden, Andrew refused to join us. He raised his eyebrow at me as if he couldn’t believe I had finally succumbed, but also as if he had expected this from me all along.
I had become a cliché, an American backpacker smoking marijuana in a tropical garden in Bali with a zookeeper.
Andrew and I landed in California on a Tuesday. Our money had run out, and we hadn’t been eating enough food, so I could see the entire bone structure of his beautiful face. Our hair was long and tangled, and I wore tie-dyed balloon pants I had picked up in Dharamsala with bells around my ankle. I was heading to a wedding in Maine, but not my own. Andrew’s flight to Vancouver would leave in an hour.
Love had taken us halfway around the world and back. Or maybe it was only the idea of love. But it left us quietly in the arrival terminal of the San Francisco airport. And how could love do that after all those nights arranging the mosquito netting carefully over each other’s heads?
I knew, even then, that love would come for us again, but leaving Andrew felt a little bit like dying. We hugged. I said goodbye. Then we never saw each other again.
This column appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times on August 18, 2013
A Pact to Make the Heart Grow Fonder?
When Andrew and I left our Vermont college town, we thought we were so incredibly in love, we tried an experiment. He flew home to Canada to work, I drove to San Francisco, and we agreed not to have sex for almost a year. Not with each other during visits. Not with anyone.
We were so certain of our strong connection that we could risk abstinence. We told ourselves we wanted to see how much the experiment would make us long for each other. Our sex had been the urgent, reckless kind you have in the kitchen before lunch because you can’t wait for the short walk to the bedroom.
The first time we kissed was at 5 a.m. on a Sunday morning after jumping naked into a mountain lake. This is when I swooned for him.
He was tall and Slavic, looking like Pete Sampras with a beard. He played bass guitar and made hummus from scratch. He believed in love and austerity: only one pair of jeans, one old Ramones T-shirt. And no sex for a year.
Maybe our love was already fading and we didn’t want to admit it, so instead we schemed and saved until we could afford two open-ended multistop plane tickets. Then we flew to Southeast Asia, where our combined burn rate was $10 a day.
We landed in Hong Kong in sweltering heat and held hands on the crowded airport bus into Kowloon. We had waited so long for this, but I was nervous. I had never been to Asia before. I had never tried abstinence.
We found a cramped room on the seventh floor of a makeshift hotel run by a passel of chain-smoking Pakistani men who cooked rice over Sterno in the cramped lobby. That was where we had our first sex in a year.
I wish I could say it was worth the wait. Instead I felt guilty, partly because I could hear the Pakistani men down the hall saying evening prayers, and partly because I felt so distant, as if I didn’t know the words to our song anymore. I worried our experiment had done the opposite of what we had wanted, and we had no connection anymore.
Our next stop was the lush coast of Thailand, where Andrew stayed in the beach hut and tried to sit in the lotus position. He had only talked about meditation before, but now he read books on Buddhism and became quieter, going further inside himself.
It was the most modest spiritual journey: an overly serious 23-year-old man sitting on a dirt floor in Koh Samet trying to figure out what his life meant. The hitch was that he had brought a girl with him, a girl who lay on the beach alone, waiting to fall back into lust and wondering why it wasn’t happening faster.
We kissed that night under a cloud of mosquito netting. He had these sculptured cheekbones and an easy smile, and I was still so attracted to his dark eyes.
But we seemed self-conscious. I had believed that one of the greatest things in the world was how love grew and grew and opened. I didn’t understand yet that love could also shut down.
The next morning two middle-aged German men in tiny Speedos walked the beach with a thin teenage prostitute. The girl looked 14 — hair to her jaw and boyish in a yellow bikini.
The men swam out until the water was up to their necks. Then they tossed the girl back and forth in the air as if she were a beach ball. She screamed and laughed, and I felt lonelier than I ever had in my life.
In Delhi we took a train to Agra and slept in a dive hotel that only rented rooms with twin beds. We didn’t mind. We didn’t even try to have sex. Maybe we were becoming the unintended consequence of our experiment. Not having sex for that whole year made it easier to continue not having sex, all of which I took as a very bad sign.
In Agra we walked the Taj Mahal, then headed back to the hotel where Andrew meditated some more, and I lay in my metal bed having what seemed like my first existential breakdown. It was the hugeness of the Taj Mahal that tripped me up — that massive, marble testament to love.
I thought my love for Andrew was my belief system. Now I needed to find a new religion. The scary weight of that pinned me to the bed while I listened to the rickshaw drivers argue on the street.
But Andrew was good in a crisis; he got me to laugh at myself and persuaded me to get dressed and fly to Bali. From there we took a puddle-jumper to Lombok and a skiff to Elizabeth Gilbert Island, which was still called Gili Meno because she hadn’t been there yet.
There was no electricity or running water, just one-room shacks on a beach and a fire pit with a grate. Here Andrew grew even more remote. But this was also where he used the word “marriage” and implied it would be us marrying. Which surprised me, because he wasn’t talking a lot by then. I still believed in the infinite possibilities of love, so maybe marriage, I thought, would be the thing to cement us.
The couple staying in the shack next to us, Simon and Margaret, told us they loved each other so much, they wanted to be the same person. This meant they wore the same red Hawaiian shirt, same red cotton shorts and same sport sandals. Hundreds of people like them lived together in the mountains north of Denver, Simon said, all wearing matching clothes and eating identical food and trying a mind meld.
“Don’t call it a cult,” Margaret said to me with a forced a smile. “I know what you’re thinking. But we’re more than that.”
What I was thinking was that love can make people do strange things, and so can the fear of losing love. I was also realizing that Andrew and I were never going to be the same person. In Asia I saw how different we were. For starters, I couldn’t even meditate. What I wanted to do was climb out of my head and find some cold beer and meet people.
The next morning Margaret and Simon argued in their shack because Simon had eaten a homemade cinnamon bun at breakfast and hadn’t told her. “You snuck it,” she accused him. “You snuck the bun and you lied.”
Their kind of love made me tired. I asked Andrew what our kind of love was. He said he wasn’t sure but that it was probably a good love.
I was 22. I wanted to hear that we had the most passionate and intuitive love in the history of the universe, even if it wasn’t true. More and more I felt as if I didn’t understand Andrew, especially when he began making drawings of Jesus in his journal and wondering aloud whether he was a real person.
I needed to find some other people to talk to who weren’t from a cult in Colorado. I walked around the island in 60 minutes and decided I needed to go home.
The next day we found a boat back to Lombok. Margaret and Simon waved goodbye from the beach, both dressed in purple T-shirts and dark purple shorts.
On our last night in Bali we met an Australian zookeeper at our guesthouse. He had a beard as long as Andrew’s and a small bag of Thai marijuana. When the zookeeper and I went to smoke in the garden, Andrew refused to join us. He raised his eyebrow at me as if he couldn’t believe I had finally succumbed, but also as if he had expected this from me all along.
I had become a cliché, an American backpacker smoking marijuana in a tropical garden in Bali with a zookeeper.
Andrew and I landed in California on a Tuesday. Our money had run out, and we hadn’t been eating enough food, so I could see the entire bone structure of his beautiful face. Our hair was long and tangled, and I wore tie-dyed balloon pants I had picked up in Dharamsala with bells around my ankle. I was heading to a wedding in Maine, but not my own. Andrew’s flight to Vancouver would leave in an hour.
Love had taken us halfway around the world and back. Or maybe it was only the idea of love. But it left us quietly in the arrival terminal of the San Francisco airport. And how could love do that after all those nights arranging the mosquito netting carefully over each other’s heads?
I knew, even then, that love would come for us again, but leaving Andrew felt a little bit like dying. We hugged. I said goodbye. Then we never saw each other again.
This column appeared in the Modern Love column of The New York Times on August 18, 2013. Illustration by Brian Rea.
