Pamela Druckerman Quotes
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I'm speaking in very broad brushstrokes, but in France, there's generally this idea that you should look like the best version of the age that you are.
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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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Here's some news you might find surprising: By and large, the French like Jews.
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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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I spend much of my free time listening to podcasts of American comedians talking to each other.
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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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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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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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French children seem to be able to play by themselves in a way.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.
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Optimism - even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty - has long been an American hallmark.
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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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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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Not many foreigners move to Paris for their dream job. Many do it on a romantic whim.
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The French talk about education, the education of their children. They don't talk about raising kids. They talk about education. And that has nothing to do with school. It's this kind of broad description of how you raise children and what you teach them.
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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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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.