Pamela Druckerman Quotes
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As an American married to an Englishman and living in France, I've spent much of my adult life trying to decode the rules of conversation in three countries. Paradoxically, these rules are almost always unspoken.
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Like practically everyone who grew up in Miami, I knew little about its history. We were more worried about mangoes falling on our cars.
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French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.
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I spend much of my free time listening to podcasts of American comedians talking to each other.
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Here's some news you might find surprising: By and large, the French like Jews.
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Practically every time I speak up at a school conference, a political event, or my apartment building association's annual meeting, I'm met with a display of someone else's superior intelligence.
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The French don't think everyone should have the same bank balance, but they're offended by extremes of inequality.
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French children seem to be able to play by themselves in a way.
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Sometimes I just tell my kids, 'Outside of France, I'm considered completely normal.' This worked until we traveled to London.
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Unlike the time sink of binge-watching a TV series, podcasts actually made me more efficient. Practically every dull activity - folding laundry, applying makeup - became tolerable when I did it while listening to a country singer describing his hardscrabble childhood, or a novelist defending her open marriage.
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When people used to ask me what I missed about America, I would say, 'The optimism.' I grew up in the land of hope, then moved to one whose catchphrases are 'It's not possible' and 'Hell is other people.' I walked around Paris feeling conspicuously chipper.
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When you're further along in your career, you probably have more money and more means; you have to stop yourself from giving your child too much. Whereas, if you're in twenties, you might just get by.
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Not many foreigners move to Paris for their dream job. Many do it on a romantic whim.
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In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.
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Before Donald Trump took office, optimism about his presidency was the lowest of any president-elect since at least the 1970s.
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We Anglophones have reasons for adopting strange diets. Increasingly, we live alone. We have an unprecedented choice of foods, and we're not sure what's in them or whether they're good for us. And we expect to customize practically everything: parenting, news, medicines, even our own faces.
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Just as dressing well in your forties entails making choices that reflect who you are and not just wearing generic basics, looking good as you get older requires accentuating and enjoying what's specific to you rather than striving for cookie-cutter perfection.
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When I moved to Europe 12 years ago, my biggest concern was whether I'd ever speak decent French. Practically every American I knew came to visit, many saying they dreamed of living here, too.
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Optimism - even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty - has long been an American hallmark.
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The overarching conventional wisdom - what everyone from government experts to my French girlfriends take as articles of faith - is that restrictive diets generally don't make you healthier or slimmer. Instead, it's best to eat a variety of high-quality foods in moderation and pay attention to whether you're hungry.
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Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.
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What you can say, what French parents say to their kids is, 'You don't have to eat everything, honey, you just have to taste it.' And it's that tasting little by little by little that gets kids more familiar with the food and more comfortable with it and more likely to eat it the next time.
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I'm not an early adopter. I'll only start wearing new styles of clothing once they're practically out of date, and I won't move into a neighborhood until it's fully saturated with upscale coffee shops.
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Discrimination was a problem before terrorism. Now, the bad deeds of a few people have made life worse for millions.