Paris in Love: A Memoir by Eloisa James

Mary Bly is a Shakespeare scholar who writes Regency romances under the name Eloisa James. I thought it was interesting that she wrote this memoir under her pen name. After dealing with breast cancer, James and her Italian husband and two children pack up and move to Paris for a year to recover. The book is a series of short entries originally entered on Facebook. I was a little put off by the format initially but it actually worked quite well. Much of the memoir describes how her family adjusts to the new culture, especially her children in school, eating new food, visits by friends from the US and relatives from Italy. But she also meditates on French women, diet, clothes and other cultural differences with great insight and humor. One of the most memorable parts were her regular descriptions of the Parisian sky through her office window. The metaphors were beautiful and brought such a clear sense of what she was seeing. James writes with great humor and insight and, although I've not read any of her other books, I think I'll have a look.