"I walk through the streets and enjoy listening to wild chattering French with the same level of understanding that one has glimpsing a row of sparrows crowded on a telephone line. Are these people really talking, or are they just singing to each other? They look far too elegant and sophisticated to be uttering the half-assed things people say to each other in New York."

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"For romantics looking for the perfect one-day tour of Paris and neighboring Versailles, Eloisa James, author of Paris in Love: A Memoir, has whipped up a dreamy itinerary, allowing for plenty of time to wander Parisian streets, sit in cafés, and partake in some French-inspired people-watching."

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"Paris is like New York in that one can do wonderful things with little money, or one can splash out in a magnificent way. My idiosyncratic guide falls into the latter: a voluptuous immersion in French luxury, in the midst of New York city."

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"Glue seems to be the cornerstone of mothering: the other day I spent hours helping paste together a large, elaborate menu for a red squirrel, a homework assignment for my daughter Anna’s science class.

“Put it under ‘Main Courses,’” she ordered, handing me a scrap of paper that read:

Roasted Pinecones on a bed of mossy bark with a pinch of beetle legs.

(If you are allergic to beetles or moss you may ask for seeds instead).

The top had fallen off the Elmer’s glue bottle—the top is always falling off the Elmer’s glue bottle—so I squeezed out gloppy white puddles of the stuff and applied it with my fingertip.

“Not there!” Anna squealed, horrified. “The pinecones are supposed to go under the ‘Pasta with Mouse Sauce!’  Now we have to do it all over. Do we have any more poster board?”

This unglamorous episode notwithstanding, there are moments when strangers judge my life to be quite glamorous. Paris in Love is my memoir of the year my family and I lived in France.  The moment I mention “Paris,” I see people’s eyes change to the kind of respect one six-year-old accords another on hearing that she ran away from home for a whole afternoon. I’ve taken on a little golden sheen, a cosmopolitan glow.

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"A couple of years ago, in the aftermath of a crisis in our personal world, my husband and I sold our house and cars, rented an apartment in the 9th arrondissement, and took off for Paris, children in tow. Paris in Love is about that year, a year I expected to be exotic...

"When we left for France, we had no grand plans for cultural enrichment. I did know that I might have to commit infanticide if my children started wearing nothing but black and using French as a verbal tic: “That movie was an agony, like…like winter…and night, n’est pas?” I need not have worried.

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