I’ve always been attracted to the margins of the main story, anecdotes, sidebars, and especially footnotes. Now that my books appear without footnotes, I miss them. I’ve been looking for a way to recreate them, and I may have found it, here in this online diary.
I thought I’d begin with incidents related to Breathless: An American Girl in Paris to be published by Seal this Fall. The memoir chronicles my life in Paris in the early 1960s when girls were not Lena Dunham’s adorable HBO Girls, but just girls in our twenties, nice girls from good schools with conflicting desires. These nice girls (in my case, Nice Jewish Girl) wanted freedom from convention—usually sexual—and made many bad choices with bad boyfriends along the way.
Besides a few stories, I plan to share some images of the book re-imagined as a graphic memoir—a side project that is close to my heart—as well as photos of some of my Paris haunts from the 60s taken on a recent trip.
And then, I’ll take it from there.
Please join me as I try to find my way through this virtual labyrinth.
