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Zusatztext 106166324 Informationen zum Autor John von Sothen is an American columnist living in Paris, where he covers entertainment and society issues for French Vanity Fair . Von Sothen has written for both the American and French GQ, Slate, Technikart, Libération, and The New York Observer ; he has written for TV at Canal+ and MTV; and he is now penning a column for the political site Mediapart. Von Sothen often does voice-overs in English for French perfumes and luxury brands, occasionally performs stand-up comedy at The New York Comedy Night in the SoGymnase Comedy Club in Paris (in French and English), and is a routine guest on the French radio station Europe 1 discussing all things US related. Klappentext A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer. John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris--not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad. Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France--to its absurdities, its history, its ideals--but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home. Introduction Like many Parisian families, we occasionally rent our apartment out on Airbnb. It’s not an easy process, but it is practical, and as long as you can power through the tedious chore of prepping your house and fielding calls from guests who forgot the code to your building, it does provide some disposable income that’s handy for all those school year vacations that pop up in France like measles every six weeks. What many Parisian families DO NOT do is rent out their apartment while they’re not on vacation and when their kids are still in school, which is exactly what we did one year by accident, forgetting that the Easter break for families in the south of France hits a week earlier than that in Paris. We realized this fun fact days before our guests arrived, which sent us scrambling to find alternative lodging (on Airbnb of course) in Montmartre, a hop skip and another hop away from our own place in the Tenth Arrondissement. Sure, it felt odd to pack up our clothes, the printer, plus the dog and cat, hair dryers and book bags, just to hoof it three metro stops west for a week. And yes, it was a bit bizarre to pass your own apartment in the morning on your way to school (now a twenty-minute schlep) and see the window of your bathroom fogged up from a stranger probably fucking in your shower. But in the end, the week turned out not half bad. It forced my family to break up a rut we didn’t know we were in, and gave us the chance to see a part of Paris we hadn’t had time to visit much. And it was during this impromptu staycation in Montmartre, dining out early with the kids at restaurants or ducking into a café for a beer midday or riding the bus (the bus?) and taking photos from the window of that bus, that I felt, for the ...
