It's refreshing to have some time off from wondering whether I look fat.
Pamela Druckerman
Where Americans might coo over a child's most inane remark to boost his confidence, middle-class French parents teach their kids to be concise and amusing, to keep everyone listening.
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.
Being an immigrant mother can be hard, but being a poor immigrant mother is much harder. You don't generally get to sit in cafes polishing your French by reading 'Le Monde.'
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 I'll only start wearing new styles of clothing once they're practically out of date, and I won't move into a neighborhood until it's fully saturated with upscale coffee shops.
One of the many problems with parenting is that kids keep changing. Just when you're used to one stage, they zoom into another.
When I was 41, I had a very bad back pain, and it turned out to be Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
When I tell French parents that I know lots of American kids who will eat only pasta or only white rice, they can't believe it. I mean, they can understand how the kid left to his own devices might do that, but they can't imagine that parents would allow that to happen.
My family was once invited to lunch at a chateau owned by a friend of a friend. As we drove our rental car up to the giant castle, my kids gasped and said, 'They must be rich!'
Remember that the problem with hyper-parenting isn't that it's bad for children; it's that it's bad for parents.
Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them.
Podcasts immersed me in colloquial English and put me back in the American zeitgeist.
Soon after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I got a letter from France's interior ministry informing me that I was now French. By the time it arrived, I'd been French for nearly two weeks without even knowing it.
I've got letters from all over the world saying what you're describing as American parenting is Chilean middle-class parenting, or it is Finnish middle-class parenting, or it is Slovak middle-class parenting.
Optimism - even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty - has long been an American hallmark.
Sometimes I just tell my kids, 'Outside of France, I'm considered completely normal.' This worked until we traveled to London.
Every time I pass a cafe, I imagine it being stormed by men with Kalashnikovs.
A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made.
I've been vacationing in western North Carolina and northern Georgia since I was a kid. I arrive, marvel at the mountains, and put on an unconvincing Southern drawl.
It's fine to discuss money in France, as long as you're complaining that you don't have enough, or boasting about getting a bargain.
Parisiennes rarely walk around wearing the giant diamonds that are de rigueur in certain New York neighborhoods.
The French view is really one of balance, I think... What French women would tell me over and over is, it's very important that no part of your life - not being a mom, not being a worker, not being a wife - overwhelms the other part.
In the English books, the American kids' books, typically, there is a problem, the characters grapple with that problem, and the problem is resolved.
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.
The main thing my bookcase says about me is that I'm not French.
Parisians won't admit that they go to the gym, let alone that they're scared of terrorists.
I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they'll regret things that they haven't done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to.
When you're the foreigner and your kids are the natives, they realize you're clueless much sooner than they ordinarily would. I'm pretty sure mine skipped the Mommy-is-infallible stage entirely.
Discrimination was a problem before terrorism. Now, the bad deeds of a few people have made life worse for millions.
Babies aren't savages. Toddlers understand language long before they can talk.
I was scared to say I was in my 40s because at that point, it sounded really old, and to out myself as a middle-aged human - I felt very awkward about it.
There's this idea in America that you can be whatever you want. That remains an ideal in terms of how you dress too - when you go shopping, you try on all possible selves and then decide.
There's an American idea that you want to look as young as you can for as long as you can. If you can be mistaken for a teenager from behind into your 50s, then you've won; you've succeeded.
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.
In my 40s, I expect to finally reap the average-looking girl's revenge. I've entered the stage of life where you don't need to be beautiful; simply by being well-preserved and not obese, I would now pass for pretty.
Certain woman will be jealous of how skinny you are, no matter what's causing it.
In your 40s, you kind of know how things are likely to go, and you're better at saying, 'You know what? That just doesn't suit me...' I remember thinking in my 30s, 'I should go to Burning Man. I could be a Burning Man person.' And in my 40s, I'm like, 'You know what? I'm never going to go to Burning Man.'
Just do what you want more often. Don't be so worried about what other people expect.
I think, in writing a memoir, you kind of give order to your life.
Although I wrote a book about infidelity around the world, I ended up concluding that fidelity is quite a good idea.
The question on my husband's birthday is always, What do you get for the man who has nothing?
Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.
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.
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.
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.
And as a mother of three with a full-time job, podcasts gave me the illusion of having a vibrant social life. I was constantly 'meeting' new people. My favorite hosts started to seem like friends: I could detect small shifts in their moods and tell when they were flirting with guests.
French children seem to be able to play by themselves in a way.
This idea - that the only way to mend the relationship post-affair is through therapy - is unique to the American script.
Get rid of the idea of kids' food. Kids can eat whatever adults can eat. You know, there is one dinner, and everyone has the same thing.
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.
