There is a certain type of story which I love love love
(love love). It involves a woman, usually a journalist or a writer, moving to
Paris and falling in love, both with the city and with the man of her dreams.
These stories always involve lots of cheese and bread, amusing descriptions of
adapting to French life (the kitchens are so small! Women are so good at
wearing scarves!) and, always, at the end there is a moment when the
journalist/writer realises she is perfectly, truly happy. My favourite of these
stories is Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French.
The year it came out I got three copies of it for Christmas (and I kept all
three, I loved it that much). Paris Letters sits in that same literary
subgenre, with one key difference: rather than being a journalist or novelist, Janice McLeod is a blogger. As I shall show you, that has a huge effect on
the final product.
Janice McLeod works in advertising in Los Angeles. She has a
good job and a nice house, but she’s just not happy. One day, sitting at her
office, she starts to think – how much money would it take to quit her job and
live in Paris for a year? She randomly picks the figure of $100 a day and she
saves up $65,000, quits her job and moves to Paris.
I like the idea of everything McLeod writes about, but I
found myself increasingly irritated by its execution. For example, she picks a
figure of $100 a day as the necessary amount she needs to have to live overseas.
It would have taken like 10 minutes to google the average costs of living in
Europe, but instead she just picks a number that feels right to her. What’s
more, after seeing how she went about saving this money, it felt to me like she
was constructing her story so it would read well, rather than telling the
truth. She says that she saved money by cutting back on expenses and selling
her stuff, in the process decluttering her apartment. But then, in one
paragraph at the very end of the chapter, she reveals that in fact she made a
bit of money on the stock market with help from some friends. So, how much of
the giant amount she was able to save – US $65,000 – came from actually saving
and being frugal and how much from playing on the stock market?
She gets to Paris and meets a butcher and falls in love. She
was a vegan in California, but once she gets to Paris she is just…not a vegan
anymore. No explanation, but I was left with the strong impression that if a
bunch of McLeod’s friends started jumping off a cliff, she wouldn’t hesitate in
joining them. At this stage, I realised that there was something a bit strange
about how this memoir was written and, when McLeod mentions she was blogging
her experience, I realised what it was – the book is written like a series of
really long blog posts. It has the overuse of the word “I” and the
telescope-like focus on the self that is typical of much personal blog writing.
Now this is not necessarily a bad thing – this writing style can be hugely
popular, as the success of blogs such as McLeod’s illustrate – but it’s not
just one I enjoy very much. I realised I had incorrectly placed Paris Letters in the “foreign woman
moves to Paris” subgenre instead of the “adapted from a popular personal blog”
subgenre. Once I realised that, I enjoyed the book a lot more because, instead
of questioning motivation and causality (like unsurprisingly, $100 a day wasn’t
enough to live on) I just rolled with it. It would have been a better book if
the secondary characters had been fleshed out more or if MacLeod had at any
stage acknowledges the privilege that allowed her to do the things she did, but
it was as a book-from-blog memoir, it’s fine.
Three stars.
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