Return to Paris: A Memoir

I was given this book by a friend as a gift. I had not read her first memoir, Apricots on the Nile, and did not know the author at all. The book is a delight, warmly written, with delicious recipes and family photographs. The book chronicles the author’s – Colette -coming of age in Paris. As a teenager, Colette - an Egyptian Jewish convert to Catholicism –returned unwillingly with her mother to Paris in 1947 but her mother flees soon afterwards. Colette stayed with her bitter, malaisé grandmère and her older brother who having stayed in Paris during the war was a stranger to her. Her grandmère housed her not out of love but because she needed her allowance. Initially, Paris seems grey and forbidding; relatives conspired to show more marry her off suitably. She resisted through food. Taken under the wing of Mademoiselle Georgette, the family chef, she develops a taste and talent for French cooking. As her mother re-marries, Colette develops an affectionate bond with her stepfather who educates her in flavour and ingredients. He gave her and her American bridegroom a gastronomic tour of four-star France as a wedding gift. Colette recollects each meal and navigates the streets of Paris with its outdoor markets, bistros, café and restaurants menus and attempts to control her fate and her life through food. The book ends with her moving to New York in 1955 and the birth of their first daughter. show less

This was a nice book but not brilliant. Her story is interesting -- she is partly Jewish, partly Catholic (her mother converted to Catholicism and pressured her to convert too), of a French mother and Egyptian father, spending a good hunk of her childhood in Cairo -- and I love that she is so interested in food. But her writing is stilted, it doesn't flow, and the editing could have been better. Still, I enjoyed it overall and took special note of the fact that here was one person who, for good reasons, did not enjoy her life in Paris.