Peter Mayle may have spent a year in Provence, but Harriet Welty Rochefort writes from the wise perspective of one who has spent more than twenty years living among the French. From a small town in Iowa to the City of Light, Harriet has done what so many dream of one day doing-she picked up and moved to France.
But it has not been twenty years of fun and games; Harriet has endured her share of cultural bumps, bruises, and psychic adjustments along the way. In French Toast, she shares her hard-earned wisdom and does as much as one woman can to demystify the French. She makes sense of their ever-so-French thoughts on food, money, sex, love, marriage, manners, schools, style, and much more.
She investigates such delicate matters as how to eat asparagus, how to approach Parisian women, how to speak to merchants, how to drive, and, most important, how to make a seven-course meal in a silk blouse without an apron!
Harriet's first-person account offers both a helpful reality check and a lot of very funny moments. Tucked into the southwest corner of the state, near the borders of Missouri and Nebraska, Shenandoah was the center of my life A classic!
French Toast is gem of a book A perennial must-read manifesto for travelers and expats alike. Should you shower before making love? Rochefort offers answers by the score. Even longtime foreign residents of France have become grateful readersβ¦. Wise and devastatingly funny.
