Paris Was Ours: 32 Writers Reflect on the City of Light

Paris Was Ours is a collection of memoirs about the French capital. It answers the question that I, as the book's editor, asked myself when I first dreamed up the idea: Why, of all the places I've lived, did Paris affect me the most? For, although I’ve lived in half a dozen cities, this one left the deepest mark.

My book is about the transformative effect of living in Paris -- “the world capital of memory and desire,” as the writer Marcelle Clements calls it so indelibly in these pages.

In this volume, thirty-two writers parse their Paris moments. Some are well known -- Joe Queenan, Janine di Giovanni, Diane Johnson, Stacy Schiff, Judith Thurman, Edmund White, and Lily Tuck among them. Others, including a French blogger who doesn’t consider herself to be a writer at all, are not. Yet each has an intriguing story to tell. And about half of these pieces, commissioned specifically for this book, are here published for the first time.

These writers came to Paris from many directions -- North America, the Middle East, other parts of Europe -- and for myriad reasons, from learning French to attending cooking school to simply finding work. They were typically young when they did so, typically open, and the experience typically changed their lives.

Some write about why they moved to the place the writer Francine du Plessix Gray has dubbed "that siren Paris" in the first place. Others about what they found after they arrived. For some, the French capital could never be home; others never left. And, for surprisingly many, this siren continued to sing even after they'd moved away.

Taken together, these essays add up to a single, multifaceted portrait -- one that, like a cubist painting, is all the more descriptive for the disparate elements it contains. The result is a rich and complex depiction of an entrancing, at times exasperating, always fascinating place to live.