WHAT’S FRANCE GOT TO DO WITH IT? CONTEMPORARY MEMOIRS OF AUSTRALIANS IN FRANCE WHAT’S FRANCE GOT TO DO WITH IT? CONTEMPORARY MEMOIRS OF AUSTRALIANS IN FRANCE JULIANA DE NOOY It’s because I want to live in a fantasy world. ELLIE NIELSEN, Buying a Piece of Paris Published by ANU Press The Australian National University Acton ACT 2601, Australia Email: [email protected] Available to download for free at press.anu.edu.au ISBN (print): 9781760463632 ISBN (online): 9781760463649 WorldCat (print): 1176308163 WorldCat (online): 1176258187 DOI: 10.22459/WF.2020 This title is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The full licence terms are available at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/legalcode Cover design and layout by ANU Press This edition © 2020 ANU Press Contents List of tables and figures . ix Acknowledgements . xi 1 . Introduction: What’s it got to do with us? . 1 2 . What’s travel got to do with it? Exploring a contemporary publishing phenomenon . 9 3 . What’s being there got to do with it? Distance, presence and belonging . 31 4 . What’s love got to do with it? . 53 5 . What’s France got to do with it? . 63 6 . What’s class got to do with it (and demographics more generally)? . 83 7 . What’s culture got to do with it? . 97 8 . What’s language got to do with it? . 113 9 . What’s wine got to do with it? . 133 10 . What’s gender got to do with it? . 141 11 . Conclusion: What’s Australia got to do with it? . 157 References . 175 Index . 193 List of tables and figures Table 2.1: Book-length commercially published memoirs of time spent in France by Australian authors, 1990–2017 ...........11 Figure 2.1: Book-length memoirs of Australians in France published 1990–2017, male and female authors .....................14 Figure 7.1: The Australian cover of Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French ..105 Figure 7.2: The US cover of Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French .......107 Figure 11.1: Year of birth of famous women filtered by nationality ..162 ix Acknowledgements Not only about journeys, this book has been a journey, and a transformative one. I am very grateful to colleagues who have sustained me on that journey, in particular Barbara Hanna, co-author of Chapter 7, whose ideas helped launch the project, Greg Hainge who helped steer it when the way forward was unclear and offered invaluable insights and inspiration, and to fellow travellers Peter Cowley, Joe Hardwick, Amy Hubbell and Geoff Wilkes, who provided food for thought along the way. The School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Queensland (UQ) has been the home base for the project and I would like to thank sincerely the school as a whole for the considerable material and personal support it has provided during both rough times and smooth sailing. UQ’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities contributed a valuable six-month fellowship to bring the project to fruition, and indeed offered fellowship itself, both of which I appreciated greatly. Conferences in Australia, Britain and France provided opportunities for discussing and refining ideas, and I am grateful to the organisers and to conference participants from around the world for their comments and insights. Early versions of some chapters/sections were published as journal articles and I would like to acknowledge UTS ePress for permission to reprint material from the following two articles: • de Nooy, Juliana. 2012. ‘The Transcultural Self: Mapping a French Identity in Contemporary Australian Women’s Travel Memoirs’. Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 9 (2). doi.org/ 10.5130/ portal.v9i2.1613. • Hanna, Barbara E and Juliana de Nooy. 2006. ‘The Seduction of Sarah: Travel Memoirs and Intercultural Learning’. Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies 3 (2). doi.org/10.5130/ portal.v3i2.117. xi WhAt’s FRAnCE got to Do WIth It? Liverpool University Press for permission to reprint material from: • de Nooy, Juliana. 2016. ‘Distant (Be)longings: Contemporary Australian Memoirs of Life in France’. Australian Journal of French Studies 53 (1–2): 39–52. doi.org/10.3828/ajfs.2016.04. and Taylor and Francis for permission to reprint material from: • de Nooy, Juliana. 2015. ‘Postfeminist Worldmaking in Australian Memoirs of Life in France’. Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 62 (1): 55–61. doi.org/10.1179/2051285615Z.00000000050. • de Nooy, Juliana. 2015. ‘Encountering Language Difference in Australian Memoirs of Living in France’. Life Writing 12 (1): 25–42. doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2015.982493. I would also like to thank Penguin Random House Australia and Penguin Random House for permission to reproduce the covers of the Australian and US editions of Sarah Turnbull’s Almost French in Chapter 7. Beth Battrick of Teaspoon Consulting provided expert editing, which was greatly appreciated. And finally, thank you to my family for your patience, encouragement and understanding throughout the journey. xii 1 Introduction: What’s it got to do with us? Preparing a conference paper back in 2011, I discover that yet another tale of an Australian in France has hit the shelves, already the 32nd book- length memoir of this kind to be published in 10 years. And although the municipal library has stocked 10 copies of Jane Paech’s A Family in Paris, the website advises that all are out on loan. I click to reserve a copy, and find myself at number 49 in the queue to borrow the book. The local market for these stories appears insatiable. Revising the manuscript of this book in 2018, I scramble to update the ever-growing list of memoirs. *** Like so many authors of the memoirs that are the subject of this book, I too at one stage dreamt of France, felt I belonged there, and found a way to live there. In my case, I was in my twenties, keen to enrol in a PhD, and even keener to escape from a destructive relationship. The grateful recipient of a French government postgraduate scholarship, I ended up staying on longer than planned, marrying in France and working as an English teacher. The eight years spent first in Paris and then Compiègne were transformative and enriching, and profoundly shaped my life in unexpected ways. They were an opportunity to discover, amongst other things, my own Australianness and to develop a deep interest in intercultural communication practice, theory and pedagogy. Unlike the authors studied in this book, I have never felt inclined to write of those years, due perhaps to the lack of a confessional bent or a sense of their banality. And the model for a successful memoir of France in the 1 WhAt’s FRAnCE got to Do WIth It? 1990s was Peter Mayle’s tale of rustic renovations in A Year in Provence, a favourite among Australians of my parents’ generation, but so remote from own experience as to be alienating. It wasn’t until almost a decade after I had returned to Brisbane that the Australian memoirs of France started to appear, first a trickle, then a flood. The popularity of Sarah Turnbull’sAlmost French changed the template: here was a Paris-based woman closer to my age and keen to analyse what she saw, and yet many readers appeared to register only the aspects of the book that corresponded to their preconceptions of France. The project was born. As I saw memoir after memoir published and seized on by an eager readership, I became more and more curious: what is it that prompts this fascination with France and with stories of lives touched, however fleetingly, by travel there? Yes, France is a popular tourist destination, but the United Kingdom attracts four times as many Australian visitors as France does (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2019). And Australians travel in very large numbers throughout Europe, Asia and the Americas without penning memoirs on an industrial scale about their exploits. The allure of all things French that I had felt as a young woman became a fascination with the fascination itself, and curiosity about the cultural variations available: if France attracts visitors from all over the world, what are the particular dreams that France inspires in different places? And how much do those dreams—and their realisation—really have to do with France, and how much with where the dreaming took place? In other words, what’s France got to do with it? The book pursues these questions as it explores a contemporary publishing phenomenon: the proliferation since the year 2000 of memoirs by Australians about their experience of living in France and the seemingly insatiable demand for them. While only one such memoir was published in the 1990s, well over 40 book-length examples have appeared since, not including fiction, short stories, feature articles, spoofs and self-published books. The early bestsellers launched a wave of publications that continues into its second decade. The memoirs, of course, do not exist in isolation. They are buoyed by media representations and enterprises urging us to live a French life, whether through adapting our lifestyle or residing in France. And in the bookstores they can be found alongside the memoirs of other Anglophones writing of their life in France: Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence, Carol Drinkwater’s The Olive Farm, Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, Julia Child’s My Life in France. 2 1 . IntRoDuCtIon An obvious peculiarity of the Australian memoirs, in comparison with those from Britain and America, is the fact that they are overwhelmingly authored by women, and furthermore marketed to a feminine readership.