American writer Elizabeth Bard tells Linda Herrick about observing life in Paris, and her father's gift

Linda Herrick writing in Canvas, NZ Herald ,
27 February, 2010

I could dislike American writer Elizabeth Bard very much indeed. Put it down to green-eyed jealousy. Bard is living the dream: married to a Parisian man who sounds absolutely charming, living in a quaint apartment in the hip Parisian neighbourhood near Canal St Martin, eating and cooking her way with ardor through the French repertoire of food.
Bard and her husband Gwendal had their first son six months ago. And now the bloody woman has gone and written a book about her Parisian life - with recipes, of course - that is not only an engaging read but a poignant tribute to her late, manic depressive father.

The book, Lunch in Paris, has also got one of the boldest opening sentences I've seen in a while: "I slept with my French husband half way through our first date."
"Ha ha," Bard laughs on the phone from Melbourne, where she was on a brief book tour. "Strangely I've had flak from everybody but my mother over that. But I told my husband it's not the UN and he doesn't have the power of veto."

Gwendal and Bard have been married now for eight years but, as the book reveals, New York-born and bred Bard took a long time to accept his proposal. She didn't want to marry him just so she could stay in France. That would have made a dishonest marriage.
A Parisian life also meant that Bard, who trained as an art historian, would have no clear career path, unlike her friends back in the United States. For a long while she kept asking herself, "what am I doing here?" There were days when she had nothing to do except go to the market.
"It took me a long time to find myself, certainly professionally," she says.
"I felt like I fell off the treadmill, the wheel that all my very successful friends in the States were on. Everybody was on a track and I made a different kind of decision ... it took me a long time to realise that I had to build my own track. I needed to find something that came from the inside rather than all this weight of expectation of what I thought it meant to be successful or worthy."

Conversely, it's also interesting to read Bard's observations on the French capacity to lock down individual ambition to such an extent that, in many circles, to dare to raise one's hopes for a better career, to take a risk, is frowned upon.
Gwendal, who has a PhD in computer science, had dreams to leave his nice, safe job and venture as an independent into D-cinema (a digital cinema project). His family was anxious, his friends sceptical. Gwendal ended up in talks in Hollywood with the likes of George Lucas, Fox and Sony. Back in France, no one could believe he'd achieved this through sheer effort, not family connections.
"In France, the idea of equality is most important," says Bard. "Sometimes the individual's wants or needs are sacrificed to the community. Sometimes that produces wonderful things like universal healthcare but sometimes, when somebody does have dreams that are a little outside the box, they can get squashed."

Such is the sunniness of the opening chapters of Lunch in Paris - when Bard relates how she and Gwendal first met (she was based in London at the time so it was a weekend romance) - that when she first introduces the memories of her father, the mood becomes much more sombre.

When Bard was a child, her parents divorced. Her father, diagnosed with what was known in those days as manic depression, spent most weekends with her, their favourite activity together being visits to museums and galleries, a passion she retains today. She writes about a day when she and Gwendal first visited Paris' Paleontology Museum in the Jardin des Plantes.
"There were no kids, no educational videos, no interactive computer terminals - just rows and rows of skeletons on wooden stands ... the air was completely still, dusty and close, like an attic full of treasures. I blinked back the strongest memory" - of her father, who had died 10 years before in sad circumstances revealed later in the book.
"My feelings about him are always there," says Bard, "and I feel so fortunate that he gave me that gift [of the weekends at the museums]. The museum seems to be the first stop in any city I go to, they are like my churches and I communicate with my dad that way.

"Certainly his illness was a painful part of my childhood and my life but it was also part and parcel of our relationship. When I look back on it, what I find is exceptional from all of those trips to the museums were that those were the little gifts he gave me, the way he could express himself to give me a sense of order and beauty when, in fact, his life wasn't always about order and beauty. I feel so thankful for that. Even though he's been gone for more than 10 years, I think of him always when I see something beautiful."

On a lighter note, Bard nails the French attitude to service when she describes an incident at Dehillerin, one of the oldest kitchenware shops in the world. Her mother wanted to buy a springform pan to make cheesecake but picked up a pate pan instead. The man serving at the counter told her off roundly, ending his lecture with, "why do you want to buy somesing when you do not know what it is for?"
Bard laughs. "The French have a very particular idea of customer service. Americans have this idea that by making a monetary exchange, you're in the power situation and no one can contradict you. In France, they are trying to impart their knowledge, their tradition, and there's a right way and a wrong way to do things. Clearly my mother wanted that pate pan for something it was not meant for and that man was going to tell her so. That happens all the time in Paris."

Lunch In Paris
(HarperCollins NZ$38.99)

Thanks to the NZ Herald Books Editor Linda Herrick for permission to reproduce her feature on Beatties Book Blog.