Paris, I Think I Love You, but Sometimes You’re Meh
“What is Paris really like? You don’t have to sugarcoat if for me, I can take it.”
By Frances Katz
Not long ago, travel magazine Afar sent writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner to Iceland. She responded with an interesting essay about looking for and not finding any puffins, an adorable bird native to the island. “Everyone comes to Iceland with a version of Iceland they’ve made up for themselves — a place of infinite happiness or infinite pools or infinite fermented shark or infinite Björk — and a visit to Iceland is very much about that particular Iceland, the one that really exists only in your mind.”
Nowhere is this idea of a place that really exists only in your mind more true than it is in Paris, although many writers seem to want to overlook this. The world’s bookshelves are overstuffed with earnest first novels by fresh-faced expats, backpackers, and dreamers who have journeyed to Paris for one reason or another and were swept up by the beauty, the culture, the food, the wine, the fashion, the scarves, and the Vespas. For a while there was even a Facebook group of expat women who were all writing first novels about Paris. I’m 98 percent sure they all featured sidewalk cafes, croissants, and cute boys named Jean-Claude who will, in the end, or maybe even from the get-go, fall madly in love with them.
