Language: English | Format: epub | Size: 1.93 MB |
Description:
A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and *GQ*
Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer.
John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris--not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad.
Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France--to its absurdities, its history, its ideals--but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.
Review
Praise for Monsieur Mediocre
"This book made me laugh out loud on the subway. J'adore every jaded character, every hilarious insight, and every upended stereotype. Most of all I felt this hum of love-for France, for family, and for life, really-that gives every essay a beguiling depth." - Maeve Higgins, author of Maeve in America
"Hilarious and touching! We hear often how cultured the French are, how sophisticated, how superior. Expat John von Sothen's Paris is, in his words, 'a mess-a confusing, roiling, weird place.' In other words, it's a lot of fun-not unlike this charming book." - Ada Calhoun, author of Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give
"I devoured John von Sothen's sharp, funny, and surprisingly tender memoir. A fresh look at a country many know only through a rose-tinted lens." - Jancee Dunn, author of How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids
"A deft, shrewd, and entertaining take on [von Sothen's] adoptive home, a place far different from how it is conveyed in winsome movies like Amelie and books like Peter Mayle's sun-dappled A Year in Provence. . . . A witty, incisive portrait of contemporary France." - Kirkus
" * Vanity Fair writer von Sothen delights in this wry narrative about the gritty, grumpy realities of being an American adjusting to the Gallic lifestyle . . . With self-deprecating humor, von Sothen wonderfully gives an insider's take on living life as an outsider." - Publishers Weekly**
About the Author
John von Sothen is an American columnist living in Paris, where he covers entertainment and society issues for French Vanity Fair. Von Sothen has written for both the American and French GQ, Slate, Technikart, Libération, and The New York Observer ; he has written for TV at Canal+ and MTV; and he is now penning a column for the political site Mediapart. Von Sothen often does voice-overs in English for French perfumes and luxury brands, occasionally performs stand-up comedy at The New York Comedy Night in the SoGymnase Comedy Club in Paris (in French and English), and is a routine guest on the French radio station Europe 1 discussing all things US related.
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