Words in a French Life: Lessons in Love and Language from the South of France

A WONDERFUL FRESH BOOK THAT ADDS DIMENSION TO WORDS IN FRENCH TO MAKE THEM MORE MEMORABLE FOR A STUDENT. LIGHT AND PERSONAL AND A GREAT AID TO MAKE A LANGUAGE YOUR FRIEND. WELL DONE!

The great thing about the stories are the truth behind them...
In the vernacular phrase of our day, "It is what it is...", great stories, by a great author, written in a great part of the world as back drop.
Bravo Kristin for living your dream and telling others about it!

Like new. Arrived in a timely fashion. Thanks so much.

Words in a French life is a fascinating look into the French culture. A vignette for each word!

As an American boy growing up in rural France, I would so have enjoyed meeting a sophisticated, yet all-American matron in the next town like Kristin Espinasse, who was way after my time. She is still a relatively young woman and had been in France only thirteen years, so people still ask her "Ca vous manque les Etats-Unis?"

As she admits, she missed things instead of people, as befits an observer whose preference is for the storied multitudinousness of things. She missed cranberry cocktails, peanut butter, shower curtains, happy hour, air conditioning and even the humble family meal of Thanksgiving that comes once a year here in the States. She did not miss her home nor the people she had grown up with. But those of us who have followed her famous blog for years know why, for she had fallen in love with a GRAND example of French l'amour, a wine salesman who is known far and wide to readers of "French Word a Day" as "Sex on Two Legs." Her humble desert home in Phoenix had some appealing, American modernist touches, the stark white light you see on Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings of cow skulls and hydrangea, or the little roadrunner that Arizona youth take as their emblem. But in provence where Espinasse now makes her home, her maison, all bets are off and so far away are her Modernist touchstones that she has stumbled, like Kate Hudson in the Merchant-Ivory film LE DIVORCE, into an incredibly simple world of ancient France, where vocabulary is the key to understanding. Some Espinasse fans love her kids, while I sometimes find them a little annoying, the way they are constantly picking on their mom for her (absurdly minor) mistakes in French--are they somehow picking up on tensions in her marriage, or are they just born brats--what my grandma used to call "fresh"? As an American boy in France, I thought all adults, both native born and tourist, in alliance against the kids; certainly they managed to show a united front of hauteur. At Chez Espinasse, every time poor Kristin fumbles for a word, the kids are in her face sneering triumphantly like mean little Napoleons.

Some readers in my book club have complained that none of the charming photos that decorate her blog manage to make their way into the book. They echo Alice in Wonderland when they complain, "What use is a book without pictures or conversations"? Well, there are plenty of conversations here, and not all of them the dispiriting kind in which your children snicker as you mispronounce "sans" as "cent," (without, for 100). Her neighbors, some of them the very French farming and shopowning kin that feature in Peter Mayle's bestselling books about Provence, have a lot of face time, and even some of her American friends make an appearance from time to time. You will learn oodles of French without even knowing it--tu piges? ("Get it?")