After posting this excerpt, I spent this perfect Sunday in a park quickly devouring Debra Ollivier's Entre Nous: A Woman’s Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl.
“The French girl luxuriates in her free time and fills it intelligently. The TV is hardly on and house-cleaning is rarely high on her nonexistent to-do list. She has museums to tour, galleries to visit, books to read, films to see, antiques to hunt, parks to stroll, gardens to grow, friends to meet and great, sumptuous meals to eat.”
“Find your center and live there. Resist the pressure to be someone you’re not; instead, focus on fully developing who you are. Don’t get thrown off course by the prevailing winds of trend. Engage in real, in-the-moment pleasure, not mindless entertainment. Feed your mind. Cultivate impressions and opinions. Know what you think.”
I'm hoping that some of this wonderful wisdom will soak into my being so that I can exude an ounce of the qualities that give the French woman that je ne sais quoi.
Ollivier also references a laundry list of films and books that I will be adding to my Netflix queue (those that I haven’t seen…) and my Amazon wishlist:
Films:
La Double Vie de Veronique (The Double Life of Veronique)
Trop Belle Pour Toi (Too Beautiful for You)
8 Femmes (8 Women)
La Femme Nikita
Amelie
Venus Beaute Institut
Happenstance
Contes de Quatre Saisons (Tales of the Four Seasons)
Entre Nous
Un Dimanche a la Campagne (A Sunday in the Country)
Jules et Jim
Le Bonheur
Milou e Mai (May Fools)
Babette’s Feast
Chocolat
Ridicule
Cousin/Cousine
Ma Saison Preferee (My Favorite Season)
Red
White
Blue
Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg)
Un Homme et une Femme (A Man and a Woman)
Books:
French Ways and Their Meaning – Edith Wharton
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Le Divorce – Diae Johnson
Marie Antoinette: the Journey – Antonia Fraser
Passion Simple – Annie Eranux
Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris – AJ Liebling
The Food Lover’s Guide to Paris – Patricia Wells
Mastering the Art of French Cooking – Julia Child
The Wine Bible – Karen MacNeil
The Cheese Plate – Max McCalman
At Home in France: Eating and Entertaining with the French – Christopher Petkanas
The Faneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris – Edmund White
Elle Décor: The Grand Book of French Style – Francois Baudot
The Fragrant Year – Claire Louise Hunt
A Well Kept Home: Household Traditions and Simple Secrets from a French Grandmother – Laura Fronly
Practicalities – Marguerite Duras
The Castle of Pictures and Other Stories: A Grandmother’s Tales – George Sand
Bonjour Tristesse – Francoise Sagan
[image found here]
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