Paris Match: Falling In (Love) With The French
John von Sothen Profile Books £12.99
When he was nine, John von Sothen visited France for the first time. Like a million other American kids on family holidays, he was bored by the cafés, the bateaux-mouches, the sights.
Until, that is, they came to a seaside town near Marseille. Beside the beach’s public changing rooms, he watched an adult brunette walking past wearing sunglasses, a headscarf, bikini bottoms and no top.
Hardly had he registered that he was just yards from two naked breasts than his parents dragged him off. In the sea he noticed that the entire beach was filled with topless women.
In this clear-eyed and charming book, John von Sothen offers a guide to French love, slang, food, conversation, schools, teenagers, TV, politics, holidays and much more
At that moment, he writes, ‘The purpose of France hit me: you could actually live like this. It was legal.’
Scroll forward a generation and von Sothen’s living in Paris, married to the French Anaïs, with two children, Otto and Bibi, and has a job writing for Esquire and Vanity Fair.
In this clear-eyed and charming book, he offers a guide to French love, slang, food, conversation, schools, teenagers, TV, politics, holidays and much more.
You learn, for instance, that Parisians never marry in Paris. They blag a glamorous manor or ancient farmhouse from an uncle or cousin, spend the bulk of the wedding budget on champagne and – if they’re really showing off – cook a pig in an earth pit.
You discover that the French enjoy stacks of holiday time. They get two weeks off in February (to support the ski season), two more around Halloween, lots of three-day weekends… You need to be wary, though, of agreeing to take vacances with a group of fellow school parents.
Von Sothen discovers how dictatorial the French can be, with their six-hour food-shopping trips, communal breakfasts, early-morning volleyball and the requirement that everyone must contribute a ‘workshop’ on painting, drama, philosophy…
A hilarious chapter on speaking French reveals that a tiny word can cause problems. When an estate agent comes to sell their home, von Sothen calls it a former ‘entrepot d’epices’ (spice warehouse); by saying a ‘duh’ rather than a ‘day’, it comes out as ‘entrepot de pisse’.
His confusion also lands him in trouble when, invited to join a salon called Futurbulence, he’s convinced he is being asked to an échangiste, or swingers club.
It’s not all jolly cultural misunderstandings. Von Sothen’s diverse neighbourhood is rocked by terrorist shootings at Le Carillon, their local bar, and the Bataclan music venue.
Syrian refugees arrive, because of its proximity to the Gare du Nord, and a French version of Occupy Wall Street appears, demanding ‘Death to Bankers’. Then a supervised heroin shoot centre opened, ‘creating wandering zombies, high or desperate, rummaging through garbage cans while they waited for the centre to open’.
The author’s dream of living in the cute French movie Amélie comes to an abrupt halt. But this wake-up call only makes his bit of Paris seem more real to him.
This thoroughly entertaining book ends movingly as von Sothen has his parents’ belongings shipped from Washington to the Normandy countryside, uniting his childhood and his newly settled family life in a shimmering vision of chez moi – home.
Coming Undone
Terri White Canongate £14.99
Rating: 
Many of us harbour a fear of exposure. Am I really the person I present to the outside world? Or is that merely, in the words of Terri White, a ‘fragile outline’ obscuring the darkness and doubts contained within?
For White, the dissonance between her interior and exterior worlds grows to an unbearable extreme when she moves from the UK to glitzy, bustling New York to pursue a high-powered journalism career.
Yet a constant weight of sadness accompanies her on the plane, ‘a rock lassoed with rope and tied to the bottom of my rib cage’. The present-tense narrative of her adult unravelling is punctuated by a past-tense retelling of a brutal childhood.
The present-tense narrative of Terri White’s (above) adult unravelling is punctuated by a past-tense retelling of a brutal childhood
And so, the origins of this burden of pain and fury are deftly and heartbreakingly revealed.
Abuse and violence, at the hands of a series of terrible men who libidinously drift towards her mother, are so ever-present that songs from the era, such as The Jam’s Town Called Malice, can only ever be associated with a sticky, sweaty erasure of hope.
The radio and TV, the latter powered by a coin-operated meter filled with hard-won 50p pieces and then greedily emptied by the landlord, spew out apocalyptic warnings of Aids and nuclear war.
No wonder, then, that a young Terri seeks temporary protection and escape in the ‘warm, beautiful, bouncing buzz’ of alcohol.
In this raw memoir, almost nobody has a name. ‘The man’, ‘a friend’, ‘an ex’ and the ‘Suicide Preventer’ are viewed through a lens of disconnection. Even temporary allies, such as the live-in landlady, can’t be trusted for long.
It seems absurd to use words like poetic and beautiful to describe a book that depicts two such harrowing parts of a life and makes woozy connections between them.
But they feel entirely apt. Although the book ends ambiguously as she returns to London, White’s life since has become more settled. She is now editor-in-chief at a film magazine and in a long-term relationship.
Rosie Wilby