Not many foreigners move to Paris for their dream job. Many do it on a romantic whim.
— Pamela Druckerman
A lot of French comedy is satire.
While I love walking past those beautifully lit bookstores in my neighborhood, what I mostly buy there are blank notebooks and last-minute presents for children's birthdays.
I'm a third-generation Miamian. I'm fond of it. I'm an expatriate, so it's the only American city I can still legitimately claim.
If you had asked me what I wanted when I was 12 years old, I probably would have said, 'To marry a plastic surgeon.' You can hardly blame me: I was growing up in Miami.
Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk.
I've gotten used to being a foreigner.
Earnestness makes British people gag.
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.
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.
When my kids correct my cultural missteps, I sometimes suspect that they're not embarrassed, they're gleeful.
A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made.
One of the great joys of a creative life is that your observations and loose moments aren't lost forever; they live in your work.
I've been vacationing in western North Carolina and northern Georgia since I was a kid. I arrive, marvel at the mountains, and put on an unconvincing Southern drawl.
Every time I pass a cafe, I imagine it being stormed by men with Kalashnikovs.
When I moved to Europe 12 years ago, my biggest concern was whether I'd ever speak decent French. Practically every American I knew came to visit, many saying they dreamed of living here, too.
Parisiennes rarely walk around wearing the giant diamonds that are de rigueur in certain New York neighborhoods.
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.
I spend much of my free time listening to podcasts of American comedians talking to each other.
The main thing my bookcase says about me is that I'm not French.
Like practically everyone who grew up in Miami, I knew little about its history. We were more worried about mangoes falling on our cars.
Your child probably won't get into the Ivy League or win a sports scholarship. At age 24, he might be back in his childhood bedroom, in debt, after a mediocre college career. Raise him so that, if that happens, it will still have been worth it.
Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them.
One of the many problems with parenting is that kids keep changing. Just when you're used to one stage, they zoom into another.
Practically every time I speak up at a school conference, a political event, or my apartment building association's annual meeting, I'm met with a display of someone else's superior intelligence.
Eating among the French certainly affected me. After a few years here, I gave up most of my selective food habits.
Having lived in America and France, I've been on both sides of the picky-eating divide.
Being an immigrant mother can be hard, but being a poor immigrant mother is much harder. You don't generally get to sit in cafes polishing your French by reading 'Le Monde.'
The whole point of a commencement speech is to say something encouraging.
We're understandably worried that staring at screens all day, and blogging about our breakfasts, is turning America into a nation of narcissists. But the opposite might be true.
I guess we're all supposed to get used to living in a more dangerous world.
Parisians won't admit that they go to the gym, let alone that they're scared of terrorists.
The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.
My family was once invited to lunch at a chateau owned by a friend of a friend. As we drove our rental car up to the giant castle, my kids gasped and said, 'They must be rich!'
The French aren't known for being hilarious. When I told Parisians I was interested in French humor, they'd say 'French what?'
Soccer may not explain the world or even contain the world. But it makes the world a slightly happier place.
One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what's really happening here. They think Paris is a socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves.
When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.
Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn't that it's bad for children; it's that it's bad for parents.
French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.
I always knew the French had a penchant for criticism and abstract thought. Usually, that just meant they complained a lot.
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.
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.
Sometimes I just tell my kids, 'Outside of France, I'm considered completely normal.' This worked until we traveled to London.
When you're the foreigner and your kids are the natives, they realize you're clueless much sooner than they ordinarily would. I'm pretty sure mine skipped the Mommy-is-infallible stage entirely.
I've never gotten a good idea while checking Twitter or shopping.
I spent most of my adolescence feeling awkward but never once mentioned it.
Around my neighborhood, I'm known as the American who talks to her computer while she types.
Discrimination was a problem before terrorism. Now, the bad deeds of a few people have made life worse for millions.
It's fine to discuss money in France, as long as you're complaining that you don't have enough, or boasting about getting a bargain.
