All You Need to Be Impossibly French: A Witty Investigation into the Lives, Lusts, and Little Secrets of French Women

This book is not funny as many readers have said. It gets very boring in a number of chapters. It basically describes French women as self absorbed, jealous, shallow, and uppity. The author seems obsessed with her own looks and weight. She paints all other women in comparison with the French as ugly, frumpy, dispassionate, and totally out of touch with their sensual selves. If you are looking for a boost to your self esteem and you aren't French do yourself a favor and Don't waste you time with this one.

This reads like a typical article in Cosmo (the Doxy's Digest) puffed up into book length. Frith Powell is witty, and occasionally sharp-eyed. She doesn't mince words about the Frenchwoman's self-absorption, competitiveness, and lack of interest in female friendships; these qualities come across as quite cold. But Frith Powell also blathers on obsessively about the Frenchwoman's thinness, disciplined cultivation of her appearance, "waxed legs," perfect haircuts, and all the other surface adornments whose fault is just that: they're surface. Frith Powell adds that Frenchwomen regard their intellects as further tools of seduction. Frith Powell's own intellect seems all over the place, as she adds a number of dubious (or sometimes just plain false)historical details about long-dead Frenchwomen to prove her theories. The writer Colette, for example, did not "dance drunk on tables" in her sixties. By that time she had severe arthritis and would have had quite a problem clambering up there. Nor did Colette "marry her son-in-law." She had an affair with her stepson, which is bad enough, but not quite the same. Frith Powell makes a number of other careless mistakes. If she was going to bring up these examples, she should have bothered to get them right.

Helena Frith Powell's book is a lighthearted glimpse at how real French women live. It's fairly true to life. Having lived in France for 9 years, I felt like there were passages I had experienced myself first hand. I particularly like the part about getting fitted for fancy lingerie. The section on sex and adultery actually went way beyond what I had imagined it to be. Her vision really is very elite and she interviews some of the power players in French society, fashion and political life. I kept wondering how it might have been different if centered more on 'regular' French women.

This book is a good read along with such takes on French women/French chic such as Debra Olliver's Entre Nous, and French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano or Chic and Slim by Anne Barone.

What I found fascinating was the way many of her observations agreed with the other books, while on a few other things, she was completely different.

While the other books are almost an unqualified hymn of praise to all things french and female, this book is much more balanced in it's observations.

We see some women who startle the author by wearing running shoes, eating snacks, drinking Coke, and wearing multicolour hair in complete denial of the french chic myth.

The books I mention, plus this one, were written in different times, except perhaps Mireille's book which was published at a similar time, but harks back to Mireille's childhood and upbringing in France of the 50's and 60s. So the observations come from different decades.

The similarities are astounding and many, while the differences could be either sampling of a different social group within France, or very real social change or perhaps a more honest and balanced view.

I thought she had very well thought out comments on relationships for example. The lack of trust, the control issues etc.

I now want to read Edith Wharton's French Ways and their meanings, as that would be from a completely different era, and generation.

Similarities would speak to a common ethos, a female point of view that spans generations, and a very French understanding of femininity and life.

I really enjoyed the book, and her sense of humour.

I did not enjoy the references of her visit to the sex toys section of a lingerie shop. The theme she explores of should she stray outside her marriage or not, with a tempting french man was also more than I wanted to know. Those were the only things that bothered me in the book and perhaps that is cultural or socio economic. She is British. As she points out, they are more apt to discuss such things, and assume that everyone else will enjoy a vicarious visit. I did not.

However in the context of what she discusses, it was somewhat in keeping as a sociological comment. And I suspect that the theme of temptation is one of many a device to keep it light and humour filled, which the book most definitely is.

I would buy it again. But I wouldn't leave it lying around for teenage boys to make ribald remarks about either.

Very Very Entertaining from the first to the last page. I didn't want to put the book down. Also very informative. I must find better lingerie shops!!