Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes Book

There's a community on Tumblr called Better Book Titles where people post snarky photoshops of book covers. This book inspired my first contribution:






How long before aspirational memories from entitled, self-deluded, white women becomes its own genre? The protracted adventures of global trotting Mary Sues, no longer content with self inserting themselves into fiction they must now self insert into entire cultures where they can act out their ingenue fantasies for all eternity. It's a little sad how saturated the market has been for the last couple years with nearly identical books, sadder still because none of them (including this one) are really bad-- I repeat this is not a bad book! It's just you get to the point where you have so many young white women learning valuable life lessons while charming foreign people trip over themselves to compliment their looks, grant them access to secret "authentic" cultural experiences(TM), give them orgasms and cook magical meals that if eaten every day will push your own happiness to burn off the extra calories.

There's only so many times you can read 'oh I went to college and I'm forced to get a job that's below me in order to pay the bills' before you want to stab people who inject random bits of French into conversations for NO REASON. Just once I'd like to see a book about a young black woman traveling to Europe and finding herself. Or a book about a young woman of any background traveling to some exotic place and meeting her fair share of unsavory, uncharming, unwise, and decidedly unpleasant people.

Okay okay... Let's focus on this book itself. Lunch in Paris is equal parts enjoyable and irritating. Enjoyable because it's an easy read about a life that many of us would love to have: exciting job in London with a Paris lover on the weekends. Lots of food, lots of interesting cultural details, the fantasy of an apartment in an up and coming area of one of the most fantasized about cities. The chapters that are basically fluff are really quite fun to read.

The problem is when Bard tries to move out of the fluff she comes off sounding like a shallow superficial twit enthusiastically lecturing an American audience on our shortcomings. Her thoughts on 9/11 and Iraq War are particularly irritating, mostly because they're delivered in passing with a sort of "of course everyone knows" arrogance that is bound to offend people all over the political spectrum. If you're going to do complex issues, do them. Dipping your toe into something serious and pulling it back out to wibble about the merits of ordering from a true French butcher just makes you look ignorant.

There is a lot of complaining in this book: Americans are wrong here, here and here, but omg why can't the French do this, this or this correctly? To her credit, Bard acknowledges her own flakiness and tries to pass off writing about it as a healthy exercise in self-deprecation. Mmmm... Not quite.

I can't help comparing this book to Memoirs of a Muse: A Novel (which will take me six more months to finish because I only read it in the bath *lol*). Whereas Memoirs is filled with ugly people, bullies, disappointing lovers, selfish decaying relatives and their suitors ... the minor characters in Lunch feel more like accessories. Everyone is beautiful, loving and charming. Not character flaw in sight. And ultimately that's what makes these type of books so contemptible in large doses. No one 'finds themselves' in a perfect, untroubled, supportive environment full of people who adore you. People don't get wiser going through that, they become obsessive navel gazers, self-centered enough to change the tilt of the Earth's axis, fixated on tiny details about their feelings and status. When an author claims to have grown through a series of remarkably pleasant events you can't help but feel that you haven't gotten the full story.

Conclusion: check it out of the library for the beach.

P.S. - BTW, whose idea was it to interrupt the book with recipes? Why would you stop the story to make people read instructions???? Maybe release a companion book, maybe use them as free content for the author's mailing list or website, but for Christ's sake they do not belong in the book!