Product Description

In this candid and funny account of her escape from English boys and her love affair with a Frenchman, Lucy Wadham describes the mutual bafflement and fascination that characterised both their subsequent marriage and her unfolding relationship with France. Using her own personal experiences over 25 years, Lucy offers a rare, insider's view of a nation that may be deeply incompatible with ours but is also, she thinks, chronically misunderstood. In "The Secret Life of France", Lucy leads us on a journey through the French moral maze, and examines French attitudes to a range of subjects from marriage and adultery to work and race relations. By taking apart the cliches she helps us gain a better understanding of this nearest and most alien of neighbours, and suggests that on some matters we have much to learn from them.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4120 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Review
Wadham's elegant, measured and funny book ... penetrating insight and wonderful anecdote and dry observation .. She offers her considerable insights and her anecdotes and, like all critical Francophiles, continues to scratch her head in love and wonder. --Independent

Review
This beautifully clever and intellectually challenging book decodes the French way of life, as opposed to the British way of doing things, and reveals much to like about being us - and being them.

Review
Pithy, larded with anecdote and all perfectly true.

Customer Reviews

TO STAY OR NOT TO STAY
That was the question that faced Lucy Lemoine (nee Wadham unless that is just a nom de guerre) when she ended her 20-year marriage to a Frenchman. She had to decide whether it was nobler in the mind to suffer the talk and habits of outrageous Frenchmen or to pull up stumps and cross the sea to England, and maybe find that better. She had actually once gone along to apply for French citizenship, and had been so appalled by the rudeness of the civil servant she encountered that she changed her mind on the spot. However when it came to the later decision she elected to stay in France after all, although significantly not in Paris.

Myself, I have been to France ten or eleven times, including my honeymoon in Corsica, but reading this book makes me think I probably know the place better from television and maybe a few films than from my stays there. Nothing Lucy Wadham says about France or the French surprises me, and although my knowledge of it all seems somehow second-hand I think I can understand to a fair extent what she is talking about. She starts her narration where she ought to start it as a young woman, with the relations between the sexes, partly but not mainly her own experiences. I am not going to précis her findings: I shall say only that she has a very interesting slant not only on the work/life balance of the French but on the balance between their commitment to marriage, their adherence or otherwise to Catholic moral teaching, and their attitude to sexual relations generally. A lot of the interest of this part of the book may be unintentional, by giving us insights into her own mental and emotional processes. She is obviously very sharp and analytical, for instance, but if the word `love' occurs at all in this context I think I must have missed it.

One very interesting, and for me quite persuasive, insight is her opinion that the French are hidebound in their inherited traditions from 1789 and also in a self-deceiving mythology about themselves. This point the author illustrates from so many different angles that I can't help being drawn into her mindset. She sees herself as freethinking and independent-minded, and I would call that realistic on the evidence here and not a pose or auto-suggestion. Being of this way of thinking clearly creates communication barriers with the French, and Lucy Wadham does not quite convict the French national mindset of outright escapism, but she seems to me to come very near to it.

The book covers a wide spectrum of cultural and political issues, and with one exception I found myself keenly interested in Lucy Wadham's take on them. The exception occurs near the end, and that may have something to do with the matter, say a deadline to meet that did not help her concentration and focus. I really thought that the chatter about M Sarkozy as something called a `sexual dwarf' was a right load of rubbish, but perhaps I ought to reread the passage in due course. One way or another it is not significant enough to influence the rating I am prepared to give this thoroughly intelligent, fair-minded, readable and enjoyable volume. What really impresses me is that not only does the book address so many difficult and contentious topics with gusto and insight, it even provides, on page 64, nothing less than `the key to the French identity'. Short of identifying The Meaning of Life, I think this is as lofty and ambitious a generalisation as I have encountered in many years.

To me a theme of this kind, when attacked with so much mental grip and expressed with such lucidity, is far more interesting and involving than many a novel. I gather the author is a novelist, although this is the first time I have encountered her work. On this showing it will not be the last time.

One step better than the usual 'My Life in the Midi' fare.
I tried reading it and quickly realised it was not for me, a middle-aged male. So I asked my wife for her opinion, and this below is what she said, and it made good sense after I'd skipped through the book again.

I didn't think I was going to like this book. I am tired of reading about the exploits of the young and privileged with all their effortless social contacts. But I was wrong, there's more to this book than the usual whimsical account of the misunderstandings and faux pas of the innocent middle class English girl abroad, desperately trying to fit in and failing... but having a fabulous time dahling!

I changed my mind, because Lucy is perceptive and painfully honest about her own short comings and lack of self-confidence, and also because she writes with self-deprecating humour.

She has gone one step further than the usual "My Life in the Midi" fare and has successfully enhanced her personal story with its close-quarter's scrutiny of French daily life by drawing on factual evidence from French social history. For example, she makes some serious points about the complicated social and political legacy handed down from the Second World War Collaboration of Vichy France.

Much is explained about the way the French operate, both on an individual and collective level. Factual information is carefully interwoven with humorous anecdotes; such as why you shouldn't be friendly with a French waiter, and what exactly is the practise of "yaourt" singing? I particularly enjoyed her description of meeting "Sarko the Sex dwarf."

Want to find out who the French despise more than the English, and why the French are the "biggest consumers of psychotropic drugs in the world?" Then read on, enjoy it and be informed!

Next time I go to Paris I will take her advice, and remember to "show no weakness", even if my French isn't up to their exacting standards.

Interesting and insightful - but falls foul of what she deems French
I enjoyed this book while in France on holiday. Or more accurately I really enjoyed two thirds of it. Lucy Wadham is very much a journalist and this is clear in her style. The first third is a fascinating insight into the French way of thinking - and it is unusual to find a book on the French rather than on France. It is equally insightful at comarissons with the English. The second third is perhaps less fascinating, but still enjoyable. One of her main theories is that, unlike the English, the French think in terms of big ideas and theories - and perhaps reflecting the time she has spent in the country, the final third of the book seems to drift into this way of thinking and, losing the personal touch, the book also loses its way a bit. It would have been more interesting to hear more about how her French raised childred adapted to the English ways - which she hints at, but no more. All in all, this is an interesting little book - with some really useful insights. If you are visiting France this summer, it is worth reading as you will find that some of the French ways are quite for the reasons we tend to think.