Review: An Accidental Parisian by Juliet Young
I’m American but have lived in Paris for over eight years now. When people ask me if it was something that I “dreamed about forever,” I always disappoint them by saying “no.” After the first time I visited this city for my semester abroad back in 2012, yes, I dreamed about coming back until I actually did it in 2014. But, I didn’t grow up thinking about Paris. The closest I got was a passion for the Madeline book series.
To be completely honest, my biggest dream growing up was to move to New York City to work in fashion. I majored in Fashion Merchanding for my undergrad and went on to work in a luxury boutique one town over from where I grew up. I occasionally went to Manhattan for buying trips, but after I landed my “dream job” I was content (for a split second) with the idea of living in Southern Rhode Island forever, the place I grew up.
Suffice to say all of that went out the window as soon as I stepped off the plane and said bonjour to France for the first time. I was smitten: with the food, wine, and lifestyle. At the time even more so than now, French life seemed slower, more intentional, and a lot more interesting than my sleepy beach town.
Eight years later and Paris is still home. I speak the language after three long years of struggling to understand what was going on around me. Some of my closest friends are French and so is my husband. As you can imagine when author Juliet Young sent me a copy of her memoir, An Accidental Parisian, I saw much of myself in the title alone.
Young lived in Paris on and off throughout the 1990s. Although the city has changed much since then, a lot of what Young describes in her memoir resonated with me. While yes, the book is about Young’s life abroad, it’s also a chronicle of her life with her family. The book opens with the death of her father and closes with the death of her mother.
The memoir begins with a bit of background so that the reader can understand why young Juliet wanted to live abroad. Her parents pulled her out of school for three weeks one April so that they could go on a family trip to Italy. The trip changed the narrator, and from then on out she knew that she wanted to learn a foreign language and live in a foreign country. Armed with both a Canadian and British passport, the world was open to her. She began her journey in the South of France — Montpellier to be exact.
She finds herself in an odd situation when an American woman she befriends decides to leave her husband for his best friend. She pushes Young and her former husband together on the eve of her departure, and, fast-forward a few months, the 24-year-old narrator finds herself in the unexpected role of French housewife before she ultimately makes the decision to go back to Toronto, where her parents were living.
Throughout the novel Young notes that despite the stereotype that French women are more liberated than their anglophone counterparts, in the ‘90s, it couldn’t have been less true. When Young finds herself making meals, ironing, and getting verbally massacred after forgetting to pick up a baguette for lunch, it reminded me of stories I had heard from my (French) in-laws. My husband’s grandmother once mused that she remembers not being allowed to open a bank account by herself — until 1965. Wasn’t this the country of liberation? Equality? I was shocked.
Young speaks much of the cultural differences in her memoir, something that I appreciated and found very relatable. She writes,
“The French, I was discovering, were a law unto themselves. They were a separate nation, a paradoxical one.”
And yet, much like myself, she wants to stay. Why? She writes again,
“The spontaneity of Parisians touched me. Behind their frosty façades lay a marvelous reactivity and humanity that contradicted their reputation as being standoffish and indifferent.”
I too am fascinated by the French and all of their ticks. Oftentimes I feel more at home here than I ever did in the United States. As a natural introvert, I feel comforted in a country where being loud and talkative aren’t necessarily considered a good thing. I’ve never really felt a pressure to change my personality here. I have (absolutely) had moments when I feel like an outsider, a stranger, l’étrangère. But, that’s only natural. I am not from here.
If you’re interested in learning what it’s really like to be an expat, you’ll enjoy reading Young’s story. In a somewhat strange turn of events, the book ends with what seems to be a cathartic release for the author: she finally tells the story of what happened between herself and her estranged sister.
In the final chapters, Young recounts the end of her family as she knew it — she begins by telling the reader that she hasn’t spoken to her sister in 21 years. She then details what happened between them after the death of her mother. The way she was treated by her so-called family is truly disgusting and I really felt for her as I read.
For those of you who love memoirs as much as I do, I encourage you to read An Accidental Parisian. And, if you’re on the fence about whether or not to follow your dreams of living abroad, here’s your sign: do it.