Free Picnic in Provence by Elizabeth Bard

of confessional, Oprahesque catharsis we Americans are used to. Nicolas Sarkozy’s minister of justice had a baby out of wedlock, and no one knew (or, rather, no one was allowed to say) who the father was. Imagine Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi trying to pull off something similar.
    “Et la maladie de…”
    Nicole didn’t even have to finish her sentence. It had been four years since my father-in-law passed away, at the age of fifty-eight, of colon cancer. I welled up with shame and self-recrimination. I should have known better. She’s still struggling to put her life back together, and here you are describing his funeral to a bunch of strangers as part of an airy-fairy piece of entertainment. You deserve to be put in the stocks and shit on by pigeons for the rest of your life.
    “Je suis désolée” …I didn’t mean…
    I started twenty phrases, each more inadequate than the last. My French vocabulary deserted me, as it often does in times of stress. There was something else I wanted to say, but couldn’t: I lived through it too . The book was not a senseless act of voyeurism. I didn’t lose a husband or a father, but I did lose someone I had come to love, an integral part of my new family. I also lost a profound sense of cultural innocence. Gwendal and I had been married for only six months when my father-in-law was diagnosed. I was just dipping my little toe into French life. Standing in hospital corridors, furious with doctors who spoke from on high or refused to answer our questions, that was the moment France became real for me, became more than a collection of cream-filled pastries and cobblestoned alleys. It was then I realized that I had given myself over to a country, a language, a professional ethos, even a health-care system that I didn’t completely understand. I was powerless, and terrified.
    “Je ne comprends pas,” Nicole continued. “Ce n’est qu’une description de notre vie.” It’s just a description of our life.
    There’s a quote by Victor Hugo that French students learn early: “Chateaubriand ou rien.” Hugo decided when he was very young that he would be a famous canon-worthy author like Chateaubriand—or nothing. In other words, if you’re not going to write a masterpiece, don’t write at all. In the mythic realms of French literature, there is little acknowledgment of writing as craft—something you can practice and get better at. There is a high premium on genius, provocation, and inspiration.
    To be fair, my mother-in-law wasn’t the only one who was confused. As much as I tried to explain to our French friends what I was doing, they couldn’t quite wrap their heads around the fact that I was telling a true story about something as itty-bitty as my own life. The memoir genre simply doesn’t exist in the same way in France as it does in the States. Mémoires in the French sense are written by former prime ministers, scientists who cure polio, and explorers who climb Everest without oxygen, not twenty-something Americans in Paris learning to whip up mayonnaise or gut their first fish. The book was hardly Tolstoy, but I hoped it had something real to say about what it meant to build a life in another culture.
    I’d spent the rest of the evening stammering through an apology; there is no direct translation for inconsiderate. By ten o’clock I felt like a wet rag wrung out from one end to the other.
    “What just happened?” I said to Gwendal after I finally closed the door behind Nicole with a thud. I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. I was so busy apologizing for my own insensitivity that I barely had time to process her dismissal. It was the n’est qu’une that killed me. But it’s just a description of our life. With a few words, she had reduced the sum of my experiences in France (not to mention two years’ worth of meticulous writing and editing) to the level of mere secretarial work, requiring no more talent or effort from me than if I’d