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”.
