By the sixth grade, the Beatles were all the rage and the girls in my school were all straightening their hair, but I still wanted my grandmother to curl my hair on Sundays, not so much for the ringlets—which didn’t even last through all of Monday—but for the experience of having her gentle hands slowly rinsing my hair in warm water. I loved how she took her time, carefully tying up the curls and how she smiled at me in the reflected mirror.
I OFTEN THINK of my grandmother nowadays—not simply because I am writing books about Frenchwomen, but because I am no longer “a spring chicken.” In fact, I’m fifty-six. I’m the mother of a twenty-six-year-old daughter. I divorced my first husband in 1994 and remarried in 2005.
Yet, even with a wonderful husband and a career I thoroughly enjoy, I am full of insecurities about my looks, my clothes, and my ever expanding, then contracting, then expanding again waistline. I worry about money. I struggle with the balance between work-work-work and having fun and enjoying my free time. I often feel that I was not a good enough mother to my daughter. I often sense that I lack a certain balance in my life. Sometimes my husband will return home from his work to find me still in my nightgown, still hunched over my computer, and he’ll say, “You are exactly where I left you this morning—you must go out and get some fresh air!”
I am a woman who often feels that I am not smart enough, not rich enough, not organized enough, not accomplished enough, not slim enough, and definitely not young enough.
All this is to say I’m a typical American gal!
And I know I am not alone in these feelings. When I wrote French Women Don’t Sleep Alone I traveled all over France with my good friend and translator, Jessica Lee, interviewing hundreds of women (and lots of men, too) and later on my own I traveled throughout the United States where I talked to hundreds more. I came to realize that as American women we have much to learn from our French sisters—yes, about love, romance, and marriage, but also about everyday living, shopping, buying fresh food, about the simple joys of being alive, appreciating what life has to offer us right now, in this moment—no matter what our age or shape or size or how much money we have in our pocketbooks. With their philosophy of “working to live” rather than “living to work,” Frenchwomen know a thing or two about balance. And I believe that they can teach us something about how we might at least start to finally feel that we are “enough.”
I decided to return to France on this quest to discover the secret to joie de vivre. But since I have very limited funds, I applied for a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellowship to live and work in Auvillar, a little village in the southwest of France. I will always be indebted to the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and to the village of Auvillar, France, for welcoming me so warmly and offering a dream come true: a home base in France.
During my journeys, I have talked to Frenchwomen from all socio-economic groups, urban and rural, old and young and somewhere in the middle. I’ve tracked down those gorgeous femmes d’un certain âge and asked them how they stay so elegant and so confident into their fifties, sixties, seventies, and beyond. I’ve attended more dinner parties than I can count. I’ve attended cooking classes and I’ve helped organize French dinner parties—from elaborate fêtes to simple, spontaneous potluck get-togethers and everything in between.
I’ve interviewed all sorts of Frenchwomen—beautiful and not so beautiful, slim and not so slim, well-to-do and not so well-to-do. I found women in the countryside, tiny villages in the Southwest, the northern provinces, the coastal resort towns, the cities (Paris, bien sûr!), Toulouse, Lille, Besançon, Dijon, Lyon, and the suburbs. I talked to university students, housewives, office workers, doctors, lawyers, bakers, shop owners, photographers, and artists. I talked to a woman who makes her own artisan soap, a librarian, several beauticians and estheticians, an image consultant, business executives, a few health care professionals, and many others. Some of these meetings were casual and some were more formal interviews. I got into conversations wherever I happened to be at any given time. In Auvillar where I lived for a month, I helped harvest grapes for wine with my fellow compatriots and artists. We visited castles and the caves at Pech Merle. We attended art gallery openings and concerts and a pottery festival.
Oh, and we shopped! And since I was on a budget, I also did a lot of simple window shopping or, as the French say, le lèche-vitrines: “we licked the window.” As an American traveler, full of curiosity, I tried to deconstruct what the arrangement of the mannequins in a window might truly mean. I took thousands and thousands of photographs of ordinary things. I also drank a lot of wine. I ate a lot of cheese. Delicious yogurt. Hundreds of baguettes, with fresh butter from the farmers’ market—oh dear, here I am confessing—again in true American style!
During all this, I asked Frenchwomen (and men) about their secrets to happiness. We talked about family, community, work, love, marriage, growing older, and body issues. We discussed their penchant for being fifteen minutes late, why Frenchwomen tend to be a little secretive at times, and what’s the big deal with the five-hour dinner party. I’ve been invited to have tea in these women’s gardens, to take a look and see what’s in their refrigerators, to discuss their buying habits, how they handle money, their secrets to keeping their love lives interesting, and yes, I’ve even seen their under things—which by the way, are quite beautiful. We’ve talked about growing older, how to stay healthy and sexy at every age. And we’ve discussed the joys of a simple life, how pets can bring us comfort, the Frenchwoman’s relationship with food, health, and fitness. Oh, and I’ve even attended their Weight Watchers meetings. Yes, they have Weight Watchers in France!
As Americans, we dress for success. We are always on the run and we grab our grande mocha lattes and drink them while driving. And we rush through our household chores with the help of the latest gadget. We want the newest car—whether it’s the biggest SUV or the latest and greatest model in fuel efficiency. We approach every new trend with a kind of childlike zeal, bursting into the room with our arms extended, singing, “More, more, more!”
But at the end of the day, does all this rushing around, all this accumulating of stuff and jumping on board to grab the biggest, brightest, coolest, time-saving, convenient, new-new-new thing really bring us happiness? With all our success and expensive vacations, our big houses and bigger mortgages and our brand-new cars—have we become so satiated that we’re really a little miserable, feeling a little let down by the pursuit of material goods? And have we forgotten how to find simple, old-fashioned, down-to-earth happiness?
AND THIS BRINGS ME back to my French grandmother and how she took hours to give me a shampoo and set, her fingers working the soap through my hair, slowly rinsing it with warm water, and toweling it dry, then sitting by me, wordlessly separating the strands and slowly removing the snarls with her fingers, one by one.
The beauty and meaning of this gift was brought back to me when Jessica Lee and I visited Besançon. We stayed with Marie Joëlle, a fashionable Frenchwoman who owns her own hair salon. Marie Joëlle spoke no English and at that time, my French was still quite rusty. Nonetheless, we were sympathique and we communicated with simple phrases and gestures. On the final day of our visit, Jessica and I were in the salon and Marie Joëlle said she wanted to shampoo my hair for me. At first, I was taken aback. I even felt that she was possibly being critical by offering this. Perhaps she thought my hair was really a mess and I was in desperate need of help! But no, she just wanted to give me this gift.
And so she did. She put a smock on me and had me sit in the salon chair, I leaned my head back in the sink while she leaned over me, working the warm water and then the fragrant shampoo into my hair.
Slowly but surely, I found myself crying. Tears streamed down my cheeks and ran down my neck and into the soapy water. I could not explain this to Marie Joëlle, but I knew that this was more than the gift of a shampoo. This was the gift of bringing my grandmother back to me, the experience of my childhood, recalling her accent, the softness of her voice, the perfumed smell of soap, the feeling of gentle hands on my scalp. The kindness of this simple and generous act.
I will tell you this now: I have lived a fairly comfortable life. I have been given many gifts in my life, but the gift of this shampoo