To be human is to have a collection of memories that tells you who you are and how you got there.
— Rosecrans Baldwin
Thanksgiving, our eminent moral holiday, doesn't have much for children. At its heart are conversation, food, drink, and fellowship - all perks of adulthood.
France and America have a long history of mutual loathing and longing. Americans still dream of Paris; Parisians still dream of the America they find in the movies of David Lynch.
My confession: I listen to great music very badly.
The great thing about candy is that it can't be spoiled by the adult world. Candy is innocent. And all Halloween candy pales next to candy corn, if only because candy corn used to appear, like the Great Pumpkin, solely on Halloween.
Paris's neighborhoods, the arrondissements, are organized like a twist. They spiral from the river like toilet water flushing in reverse and erupting out of the bowl - a corkscrew or what have you, a flattened pig's tail, a whorling braid notched one to 20.
In Europe, it's common to hear about young professionals living with their parents. With the continent's high rents and taxes and its population density, it makes sense.
Americans love popcorn, and their love doesn't quit.
Tintin comics evoke Bermuda, where my parents doled out comics for good behavior and my grandmother taught me how to shuffle cards.
My first novel, 'You Lost Me There,' has been described as a beach read. Tough bracket, beach reads. There's not much room for mistakes when you're competing against the sun for a person's attention.
Rosecrans is a family name - it used to be a last name in our family.
Machismo requires Latin blood. I'd say I never experienced machismo up close until I worked in a French office; the typical Wall Street gunner has the soul of a coffee filter in comparison.
I think the place we love the most is the Parc des Buttes Chaumont. It's in the 19th arrondissement. It's where I would go jogging and my wife, Rachel, and I would go for walks. It's appreciated by Parisians but it's not really known to tourists.
In college, my wife did a study abroad in Nairobi, and I did the exact same program in Cape Town. For me, the experience of being in that other culture really set up a longing. When I'm traveling, things seem really sharp. You learn things ten times faster.
When I went to Paris, I had a lot of ideas about it that were formed in the sort of ether that flows about if you watch too many recent Woody Allen movies or took French classes as a kid. I was certainly full of those.
My grandmother died from Alzheimer's, and it was a big shock. For the families left behind, it is not an easy closure. It's not a gradual fading. The person is losing so much of their humanity as they're dying. Losing your memories, you lose so much of who you are as a person.
As a child, I was bonkers for Christmas. The entire month of December, I couldn't sleep at night from anticipation.
Heads of France lead from a palace, and traditionally they retire to a cloud.
American-French relations, their pitch and volume, have always been influenced by the media.
If I see a roll of Bubble Tape, a bag of Haribo Gold-Bears or a pouch of green-apple Big League Chew, I'm eleven again.
Loving relatives and home-cooked meals are solid levees against a recession.
My father-in-law has ear hair like a wolverine. It fans out from the auricles, wafting from the ridge lines like cilia, like gray feathered plumage.
For years, I've felt an obligation to harvest an animal, since all my life I've so mindlessly consumed them. But that was from the safety of my desk.
My ideal vacation isn't about complex maneuvers. I want to arrive somewhere foreign where I don't speak the language, go hiking, then plop down in a sunny square, have drinks, read a book, and see what happens.
No one really knows the value of book tours. Whether or not they're good ideas, or if they improve book sales. I happen to think the author is the last person you'd want to talk to about a book. They hate it by that point; they've already moved on to a new lover. Besides, the author never knows what the book is about anyway.
That's the thing: once it's in their hands, it's not my book anymore, it's theirs. I have no idea what happens when they start to digest it. So when someone writes me to explain how they read it, what it was like, what they enjoyed, there's a thrill. Writers who don't make their email addresses public are missing out on something wonderful.
I actually don't think there is machismo in America, unless it's the cowboy type - the silent, smoking brooder.
I think one of my favorite things about Paris is the ever-present, nonstop beauty of the city. So I would just walk as much as possible.
My ambition was to be cosmopolitan. I grew up in the suburbs. I went to college in Maine. I had a dream in my head that if you wanted to be the most urbane, living-life-to-the-fullest kind of person, Paris was the place to be.
I was 23 when I learned how to cook; I grew up around the same time. It was precisely then that Thanksgiving started to mean something more. Growing up, Christmas was always about me, and eventually you, when I finally started to enjoy the giving part. But Thanksgiving is always about us.
Venice, Italy, is one of my favorite cities, a place I've been lucky enough to visit twice.
I like to find music that shares a rhythm with the sentences I'm working on. And though I'll probably regret saying this, I think some songs actually don't sound too bad when they're played through lousy speakers.
My mother still has a three-step system to eating candy corn. First she eats the white tip, then the orange middle, then the yellow end. She swears each segment tastes different.
In our town, Halloween was terrifying and thrilling, and there was a whiff of homicide. We'd travel by foot in the dark for miles, collecting candy, watching out for adults who seemed too eager to give us treats.
Frankly, it's depressing, each night sleeping in someone else's home. I miss having a roof to my name. Our situation isn't an 'All in the Family' cliche, but it's still easy to see reality in plain terms: I live with my in-laws, and I can't say when that will change.
When I was a kid, we didn't eat in restaurants much, but a good report card meant my sister or I could choose anyplace in town for a dinner out, and I always picked Benny's, a dive bar near the train station, because they had the best nachos around.
About guns, about hunting, it's safe to say I know nothing. The last gun I fired was a musket at Boy Scout camp.
I can't picture going to a beach, or anywhere on vacation, without a couple of books as companions.
Bookstores don't exactly dot the American highway in the grand manner of Sbarros.
Of course, there's no reason that Paris should have decent Mexican food. It's a silly expectation - there's a Mexican population in Paris, but they're not exactly traveling there from across the border. Paris also doesn't do Peruvian all that well, either.
By and large, the Mexican food in Paris is horrible.
Lunch is the best time of day to eat in Paris. Then you get to go walk it off afterwards.
I never had the idea of moving to Paris and becoming something. I liked the idea of living in Paris because it seemed to have so many parts of life I really enjoyed. The people there seemed to prize literature and art, food and drinking, a more hedonistic way of living.
