Not many foreigners move to Paris for their dream job. Many do it on a romantic whim. Pamela Druckerman Read Quote
Even for natives, French satire is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. Its unspoken punch line is typically that things have gone irrevocably wrong, and the government is to blame. Pamela Druckerman Read Quote
The French aren’t known for being hilarious. When I told Parisians I was interested in French humor, they’d say ‘French what?’ Pamela Druckerman Read Quote
I spend much of my free time listening to podcasts of American comedians talking to each other. Pamela Druckerman Read Quote
The overarching conventional wisdom – what everyone from government experts to my French girlfriends take as articles of faith – is that restrictive diets generally don’t make you healthier or slimmer. Instead, it’s best to eat a variety of high-quality foods in moderation and pay attention to whether you’re hungry. Pamela Druckerman Read Quote
We Anglophones have reasons for adopting strange diets. Increasingly, we live alone. We have an unprecedented choice of foods, and we’re not sure what’s in them or whether they’re good for us. And we expect to customize practically everything: parenting, news, medicines, even our own faces. Pamela Druckerman Read Quote
Eating among the French certainly affected me. After a few years here, I gave up most of my selective food habits. Pamela Druckerman Read Quote
As an American married to an Englishman and living in France, I’ve spent much of my adult life trying to decode the rules of conversation in three countries. Paradoxically, these rules are almost always unspoken. Pamela Druckerman Read Quote
Where Americans might coo over a child’s most inane remark to boost his confidence, middle-class French parents teach their kids to be concise and amusing, to keep everyone listening. Pamela Druckerman Read Quote
