A Love Affair with France

Francophile that I am, I’m delighted to welcome author of Paris Mon Amour and host of, On The Literary Sofa, Isabel Costello to the blog.

Here’s Isabel  talking about her lifelong love affair with with France, followed by my review of her debut novel Paris Mon Amour ~

Since the publication of my debut novel Paris Mon Amour, I am often asked about my love of France and the French language.  It’s a long story that began years before I was born, and it has many chapters.

In 1950, my mother was a 16-year-old schoolgirl, the eldest of six (later seven) children from a working class family. To encourage her gift for languages, the nuns at her convent school used their connections to arrange for her to stay with a family in France who had a daughter of the same age. That girl became my mum’s friend for life, and in due course, my godmother – I am named after her.  Isabelle’s two daughters are my oldest friends and the bond between our families – now spanning three generations – set the course of my mother’s future and mine.

In many ways, I am something of a hybrid.  My upbringing held no social or financial advantages but it provided me with something far more precious: education and opportunities which extended my horizons.  My mum became a French teacher after studying at Bristol and the Sorbonne and as my dad was a self-employed lorry driver we were able to take off to France every summer.

Looking back, those three weeks were the good times, my parents relaxed and free from the strain of everyday life, my little sister as companion.  When we weren’t on the beach at La Baule with our friends and their cousins being taught French slang, we explored the rest of the country on a shoestring, camping first in an ancient alpine tent, then later, a campervan my dad converted from an A series Ford Transit.

Another somewhat unlikely milestone in my personal history of France was the year I turned 12, when we made it all the way to Rome to see the Pope. As a rare indulgence (if you can call it that) we stayed in a convent guesthouse run by Swedish nuns, where we fortuitously crossed paths with another French family. I was told off for giggling when the 15-year-old son broke the reverential silence of the establishment by hurling the car keys onto the breakfast table. 37 years later, he’s still loud and outrageous, one of my closest friends and my go-to Paris expert.  He’s told me a lot of things you wouldn’t find in any guidebook.

In our mid-late twenties my husband and I discovered the excitement of long-haul travel and France fell off the radar for some time. What’s more, my languages degree had put me off reading; I couldn’t enjoy a book without pulling it to pieces (little did I know what becoming a writer would do).  Was this it for my passion for France and fiction?  Of course not – we soon embarked on a new life as parents and France now has the same kind of significance for our children as for me. There’s something about returning to a familiar place as you grow up – or watch your kids grow up; this year we’re returning for the seventh time to a gîte on a vineyard in the Lubéron, a five minute walk from the house where Peter Mayle wrote A Year in Provence. Both sons are studying two foreign languages, skills sadly in sharp decline in the UK, and they’ve never needed convincing of the benefits and rewards. I’m just happy to have been able to pass on something that means so much to me.

If only I’d kept track of the time I’ve spent in France – it definitely amounts to years. I’ve visited every region and every major city except Lille and Toulouse.  I must have notched up at least 40 trips to Paris, four during the writing of Paris Mon Amour, and my relationship with the city has intensified as a result of seeing it differently.  The familiar idealised version of Paris is very seductive, and I certainly wanted to tap into that glamour and sexiness, whilst splicing it with some of the dark realities of living there. My narrator Alexandra is not a visitor. She’s an Anglo-American who’s lived in the city for ten years, happily married to a French man, or so she thought.  As an ex-pat, there will always be things about France that Alexandra doesn’t get, and even after she discovers her husband’s cheating she can’t justify her affair with the son of his best friend as ‘going native’.  The perspective of the informed outsider has a lot of narrative potential and it’s one I personally embrace – I have never wanted to be French.

And yet this beautiful, complex country has had a profound influence on me through its landscape and people, its language and culture and especially its authors.  It has played a part in the way I think and feel about almost everything (I recently discussed What the French taught me about sex for Red Online).  Without the French side to my life I wouldn’t be the person or the writer that I am.

PARIS MON AMOUR – REVIEW

There are many different kinds of love, and in the rich tapestry that is Isabel Costello’s, Paris Mon Amour we encounter them all, from the love that destroys, to the love that endures despite all the odds.

At the heart of this beautifully crafted, intelligent, novel is a dangerous love, a passionate, all consuming affair which threatens all who live within its orbit. As Alexandra is drawn to her younger lover like a moth to the flame, we celebrate her coming alive in the city of lovers. We walk it streets with her, watch from its windows and balconies. If Paris Mon Amour is a homage to love and ultimately to its power to heal, it is equally a homage to a city. A city, ‘in early summer when promise and delivery are in perfect balance,’ brought alive by the outsider, by an author with an assured touch, who knows its streets intimately.

 Engaging, sexy and compelling, one of the things I found myself admiring most about this novel was its refusal to fall into the cliché of older woman and younger man. Paris Mon Amour is more than this, it is a portrait of hidden grief and a forbidden love that transcends age.

 But passions such as this rarely end well, they leave casualties in their wake and Costello does not shy away from the difficult truth of this. Nor does she avoid the consequences of the affair, nevertheless, in her ending she leaves us gracefully, with love, and with hope for the future.

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