"Lunch in Paris" by Elizabeth Bard

What a great book this is, but I am biased as I love reading about people living in places that I dream of living in. I was engrossed in Elizabeth’s story from start to end. I laughed, I was sad, I got lost in her descriptions of the places, the people, and particularly the food of her Paris, the one that the tourist rarely sees. To complement the story, the recipes of some of the dishes that Elizabeth talks about, are scattered throughout. You can see by the picture opposite that I’ve already made the delicious “Chicken and Sweet Pepper Stew” featured on page 51.

Like any good love story, it starts with the meeting of two people, Elizabeth, an American living in London, meets a good looking Frenchman, Gwendal, on the stairs at an academic conference in London. As someone who has conducted a long distance relationship with my husband in the early days of our relationship, I could relate to Elizabeth’s descriptions of her weekends with Gwendal, where she saw Paris through the eyes of someone just visiting without the challenges of actually living there. The fact that Elizabeth doesn’t speak very much French is not a problem when the only person she talks to is Gwendal and his English is fine, the student flat that Gwendal lives in is quaint rather than freezing, and when they venture out, there are museums and galleries to visit, the food markets, boutiques and tearooms in the Passage Vivienne to explore. But after moving in with Gwendal five months later, the realities of living in a country where you don’t speak the language, where the social norms are so different, and there is no job on the horizon sink in.

I appreciated the honesty that Elizabeth brings to her story. I could feel her spirits, high on the euphoria of love, slowing slipping with each passing chapter as she deals with the challenges of everyday living in a strange city. Social situations are headache inducing when you don’t know the language and everyone else has known each other from childhood. In monetary matters, Gwendel and Elizabeth’s differing attitudes to debt become apparent when they want to buy an apartment. As Elizabeth writes – “debt, it turns out, is not universal. As hard as this is for Americans to believe, most of the world does not live life off of borrowed money. Most French people do not possess a credit card as we know it”.
Then, there’s the French attitude to figures of authority. Elizabeth experiences the frustration with the medical system when confronted with her father-in-law’s diagnosis with terminal cancer. “When you live in another culture, sometimes even life and death decisions are made in a way that you don’t understand. Suddenly, I was plunged into a world where a second opinion was an insult to your doctor; patient and family received different, often contradictory sets of facts; and a precise diagnosis, never mind a comprehensive list of treatment options, was simply never presented”. Very different from the American and dare I say it, the Australian way of dealing with serious illness.

The legal system is also a minefield for someone from outside of France to understand, as Elizabeth finds out when they have to deal with the judicial system following Gwendal leaving his job and his employer not giving him the necessary papers for him to get the unemployment benefit.  Then there's the inability of the landlord to evict the noisy, illegal tenants in the upstairs apartment as French real estate law favours the tenants, legal or not. As Elizabeth tells one of her expat friends in Paris after a particularly trying day, “F.W.A.”, France wins again.

On a lighter note, Elizabeth’s chapter on why “french women don’t get fat” had me chuckling. I loved her observation that, “it has a lot to do with stern looks from your mother-in-law – and the annual return of "le bikini”. I sympathised with her embarrassment when, given the choice of a small or normal piece of the cake , she chose normal.  "Are you sure?" says in mother-in-law.  Obviously the wrong choice.

When I finished the last page of the book I felt a little sad, not because the story ended that way, but because I was no longer a vicarious participant in Elizabeth’s life, experiencing the wonders and challenges of living in a city that is the subject of fairy tales.