When in French: Love in a Second Language

by Lauren Collins Narrated by Khristine Hvam

Overview

A language barrier is no match for love. Lauren Collins discovered this firsthand when, in her early thirties, she moved to London and fell for a Frenchman named Olivier-a surprising turn of events for someone who didn't have a passport until she was in college. But what does it mean to love someone in a second language? Collins wonders, as her relationship with Olivier continues to grow entirely in English. Are there things she doesn't understand about Olivier, having never spoken to him in his native tongue? Does “I love you” even mean the same thing as “je t'aime”? When the couple, newly married, relocates to Francophone Geneva, Collins-fearful of one day becoming "a Borat of a mother" who doesn't understand her own kids-decides to answer her questions for herself by learning French.

When in French*is a laugh-out-loud funny and surprising memoir about the lengths we go to for love, as well as an exploration across culture and history into how we learn languages-and what they say about who we are. Collins grapples with the complexities of the French language, enduring excruciating role-playing games with her classmates at a Swiss language school and accidently telling her mother-in-law that she's given birth to a coffee machine. In learning French, Collins must wrestle with the very nature of French identity and society-which, it turns out, is a far cry from life back home in North Carolina. Plumbing the mysterious depths of humanity's many forms of language, Collins describes with great style and wicked humor the frustrations, embarrassments, surprises, and, finally, joys of learning-and living in-French.

Editorial Reviews

The New York Times Book Review - Suzy Hansen

…Collins's book turns out to be far more ambitious than the average memoir about moving abroad…[When in French is] a thoughtful, beautifully written meditation on the art of language and intimacy. The book unfolds like several books in one: on moving abroad, on communication in human relationships, on the history of language and, in the end, on the delights of cross-cultural fusion…[Collins] sure knows how to close a paragraph. I often found myself shaking my head in admiration at her sentences, the way her ideas would cohere. She has also nailed the best metaphor for that utterly desperate moment when, in a foreign language, you can't find the correct word but really, really need to swear like a truck driver—it's like frantically "trawling around the bottom of a messy purse for a missing set of keys."

Publishers Weekly

05/30/2016
This smart memoir by New Yorker writer Collins is an extended essay on how the languages we speak shape who we are. Collins is an American living in London who speaks little French when she falls in love with a Frenchman who speaks excellent English. They marry and move to Francophone Geneva, where Collins decides to learn French after envisioning herself as a mother who can’t understand half of what her own kids are saying. Throughout, Collins shares excerpts from works of history, philosophy, psychology, politics, and literature that show how pervasive language’s influence is on every aspect of our lives. Political goofs result from mistranslation. Even the meaning of love might depend on how you express it: Does “Je t’aime” mean something different from “I love you”? The transitions can be clunky as Collins shifts between story telling and embarking on academic discussions, but her writing is often elegant and exact. Agent: Elyse Cheney, Elyse Cheney Literary. (Sept.)

From the Publisher

New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins’s terrific memoir, When in French: Love in a Second Language, depicts bilingual romance with fresh asperity: “What was an ‘expat’ but an immigrant who drinks at lunch?”.” —Vogue.com 

“A thoughtful, beautifully written meditation on the art of language and intimacy. The book unfolds like several books in one: on moving abroad, on communication in human relationships, on the history of language, and in the end, on the delights of cross-cultural fusion.”—The New York Times Book Review 

“An ambitious and entertaining meditation on the ways in which love and language make us who we are…[Collins] weaves together personal, historical, and sociological anecdotes with ease, roving nimbly between awkward interfamilial interactions, neo-Whorfian theory, the comically tortured inner workings of the Académie française, and far beyond…Collins’ writing is endlessly, delightfully rich. She’s mastered love in her second language—and crafted a masterpiece in her first. Surely you’ll fall for this book too.”—Buzzfeed
 
“[The book] takes off when Collins throws herself into language classes and funny Franglish conversations with her in-laws. She takes an amusing side trip to L’Academie Française, France’s language police, to watch a committee try to come up with a substitute for the invasive English expression ‘business as usual.’ Gradually, fitfully, it all comes together.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune 

“[An] engaging and surprisingly meaty memoir…When in French ranges from the humorously personal to a deeper look at various theories of language acquisition and linguistics…There’s far more to Collins’ book than screwball comedy, and those who have weathered linguistic crossings themselves are apt to find particular resonance in its substantive inquiry into language, identity, and transcultural translation.”—NPR.org

“Collins offers up her own love affair as a case study, applying the tools of the social sciences to her life, and offering, along the way, a primer on linguistics and semantics and a cultural history of language. But if that makes When in French sound boring or academic, I’ve given you the wrong impression: Collins’s memoir is anything but dull. She’s analytical, but never clinical, with a reporter’s keen ear for nuance, and her curiosity about words—the meaning beneath their meaning—is infectious.”—Vogue

“Collins’ memoir, frequently funny, overflows with ideas about culture and communication.”—Newsday

“This gorgeous, finely woven memoir explores the gaps between words and worlds.”—Refinery29

“We can't all fall in love with a dashing Frenchman and move to France, but that's what Lauren Collins found herself doing when she met Olivier. This delightful memoir explores the New Yorker staff writer's experience learning the French language—and the culture and people besides.”—Elle.com

“In her emotional, erudite memoir…[Collins] documents her linguistic labors, including the missteps–she accidentally tells her mother-in-law she gave birth to a coffeemaker–on the road to mastery. At times she expounds on the history and philosophy of language; at others, it feels like catching up with a clever friend you haven’t seen since college. But the most intriguing question posed is as much about identity as language: Are you someone else when you speak and live in a non-native tongue?”—TIME

“A collection of musings on translation, linguistics, and cultural identity, all underpinned by a satisfying love story…Collins’s is the best kind of memoir: the kind that uses the author’s own experience as an entryway to—and a bridge between—a number of universal topics.”—Brooklyn Rail

“Part memoir, part cultural exploration, this heartwarming read will appeal to romantics and lovers of language alike.”—RealSimple.com

“Woven into Collins’s poignant—and often laugh-out-loud funny—personal story of trial and erreur is a primer on pop linguistics, with meditations on whether the language we speak affects the way we think and feel.”—Departures

“An exceptionally insightful meditation on how language informs culture and personality. It’s a lovely read that gets better the more you sit with it.”—Jason Zinoman, The New York Times 

“[A] wry memoir…[Collins] unearths other tidbits of trivia and history that will fascinate lovers of words and language…The heart of the book lies in Collins’ personal story, which she tells with humor, humility and a deep affection for the people and cultures involved. Whether she’s describing the grinding exhaustion of learning a foreign language or the euphoria of a breakthrough, her determination makes the reader root for her. When in French is both an entertaining fish-out-of-water story and a wise and insightful look at the way two very different people and families manage to find common ground.”—BookPage

“Cleverly organized, well-written…As the memoir unfolds, Collins does not spare herself, sharing her apprehensions and her missteps with candor and frequently with humor…Filled with pleasing passages in every chapter.”—Kirkus

“[A] smart memoir…on how the languages we speak shape who we are…[Collins’s] writing is…elegant and exact.”—Publishers Weekly

“A memoir of the New Yorker writer’s experience falling in love with a French banker and winding up in Geneva, recounted in [Collins’s] distinctive and deeply intelligent mix of insight and humor.”
—Thomas Chatterton Williams, The Nation’s What to Read This Summer

“A linguistic love story…Lauren Collins captures the thrilling vertigo of trying to be yourself in a foreign language. She’s an expert storyteller and an excellent traveling companion.” —Pamela Druckerman, author of Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting

“Lauren Collins is one of the smartest, most humane, most charming writers I know. Nobody is more observant of fine details, or more curious about the big picture. In When in French, we finally see her mad skills and effortless touch on display in a book-length memoir— a love story about a person, a language, and a whole form of cultural knowledge. Collins makes the world seem like a bigger, more effervescent, more intoxicating place. “—Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

“As a (sadly) monolingual American, I devoured Lauren Collins’s sharp, funny tale of bilingual romance and learning to speak French. Part acerbic love letter to that language and part meditation on language itself, When in French is so charming it made me want to learn French too.”—Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.: A Novel

“That anyone can actually communicate with anyone is a miracle. When in French is a hilarious and intelligent book that delves into the history of language, falling in love, and by the way includes words like Ribuy-tibuy. Gumusservi.  Komorebi and Schnapsidee.”—Maira Kalman, author and illustrator of Beloved Dog and The Principles of Uncertainty

DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile

The complexity of language and how it’s intricately interwoven into the philosophy and history of family and culture is revealed in this audiobook of an American woman who is navigating her relationship with her French husband. Infusing warmth and humor into her narration, Khristine Hvam brings out the range of emotions that the author experiences as she attempts to understand the nuances of languages that cause numerous misunderstandings in her marriage. Hvam’s mostly polished French accent reflects a woman who becomes intent on learning French after discovering that language is power. Articulate and heartfelt, Hvam’s narration expresses the multifaceted and fascinating aspects of language and how it affects one’s identity. M.F. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2016-05-23
A memoir of unexpected love with a Frenchman. While living in London as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Collins fell in love with Olivier, who grew up in a beach town near Bordeaux. He spoke English fairly well, but the author spoke no French. In her cleverly organized, well-written story, Collins explores how language differences can be overcome with difficulty but can also threaten romance due to poor communication. Raised in North Carolina, Collins chose London as her overseas locale partly because she lacked confidence about developing a work life and a private life in a foreign language. Due to her sudden interest in Olivier, the author had to find the resolve and the skill to learn French beyond the tourist basics. As the memoir unfolds, Collins does not spare herself, sharing her apprehensions and her missteps with candor and frequently with humor. She also shares her misunderstandings and arguments with Olivier as they labored to reach a comfortable place in a bilingual romance. Collins was also painfully aware of differences other than language. She was a writer, he a mathematician; she was a believer in organized religion, he an atheist. She also acknowledged that her romantic history featured poor judgment in men, even when language and culture presented no obvious barriers. As Collins gradually decided to commit to learning French because Olivier seemed worth the effort, she breaks from the personal narrative to share scholarly knowledge with lay readers—e.g., why is the world divided by so many languages and dialects? How did French develop specifically? What are the sometimes-surprising differences between English, especially American English, and French, regarding sentence structure, gender identification of specific words, and linguistic purity? Throughout, the author ably weaves together the personal and the historical. A memoir filled with pleasing passages in every chapter.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171877927
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	09/13/2016
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

One

The Past Perfect

Le Plus-que-parfait

I hadn’t wanted to live in Geneva. In fact, I had decisively wished not to, but there I was. Plastic ficuses flanked the entryway of the building. The corrugated brown carpet matched the matte brown fretwork of the elevator cage. The ground floor hosted the offices of a psychiatrist and those of an ­iridologue—a practitioner of a branch of alternative medicine that was popularized when, in 1861, a Hungarian physician noticed similar streaks of color in the eyeballs of a broken-legged man and a broken-­legged owl. Our apartment was one story up.

The bell rang. Newlywed and nearly speechless, I cracked open the door, a slab of oak with a beveled brass knob. Next to it, the landlord had installed a nameplate, giving the place the look less of a home than of a bilingual tax firm.

A man stood on the landing. He was dressed in black— T-shirt, pants, tool belt. A length of cord coiled around his left shoulder. In his right hand, he held a brush. Creosote darkened his face and arms, extending his sleeves to his fingernails and the underside of his palms. A red bandanna was tied around his neck. He actually wore a top hat. I hesitated before pushing the door open further, unsure whether I was up against a chimney sweep or some sort of Swiss strip-o-gram.

“Bonjour,” I said, exhausting approximately half of my French vocabulary.

The man, remaining clothed, returned my greeting and began to explain why he was there. His words, though I couldn’t understand them, jogged secondhand snatches of dialogue: per cantonal law, as the landlord had explained to my husband, who had transmitted the command to me, we had to have our fireplace cleaned once a year.

I led the chimney sweep to the living room. It was dominated by the fireplace, an antique thing in dark striated marble, with pot hooks and a pair of side ducts whose covers hinged open like lockets. Shifting his weight onto one leg with surprising grace, the chimney sweep leaned forward and stuck his head under the mantel. He poked around for a few minutes, letting out the occasional wheeze. Coming out of the arabesque, he turned to me and began, again, to speak.

On a musical level, whatever he was saying sounded ­cheerful, a scale-skittering ditty of les and las. Perhaps he was ­admiring the condition of the damper, or welcoming me to the neighborhood. He reached into his pocket, proffering a matchbook and a disc of cork. Then he disappeared.

Minutes went by as I examined his gifts. They seemed like props for a magic trick. More minutes passed. I launched into a version of rock, scissors, paper: since the cork couldn’t conceivably do anything to the matches, then the matches must be meant to light the cork. Action was required, but I feared potentially incinerating the chimney sweep, who, I guessed, was making some sort of inspection up on the roof.

Eventually he returned, chirping out some more instructions. I performed a repertoire of reassuring eyebrow raises and comprehending head nods. He scampered away. I still had no idea, so I lit a match, held it to the cork, and tossed it behind the grate. The pile started smoking and hissing. After a few seconds, I lost my nerve and snuffed it out.

The chimney sweep resurfaced, less jolly. He had appointed an assistant who, it appeared, was actively thwarting his routine. This time he spoke in the supple, obvious tones one reserves for madwomen, especially those in possession of flammable objects. Reclaiming the half-charred piece of cork, he lit a fire and, potbelly jiggling, sprinted back out the door.

Finally, he returned and reported—I assume, since we used the fireplace without incident all that winter—that ­everything was in order.

“Au revoir!” I said, trying to regain his confidence, and my standing as chatelaine of this strange, drab domain. “Hello” and “good-bye” were a pair of bookends, propping up a vast library of blank volumes, void almanacs, novels full of sentiment I couldn’t apprehend. It felt as though the instruction manual to living in Switzerland had been written in invisible ink.

I had moved to Geneva a month earlier to be with my husband, Olivier, who had moved there because his job required him to. My restaurant French was just passable. Drugstore French was a stretch. IKEA French was pretty much out of the question, meaning that, since Olivier, a native speaker, worked twice as many hours a week as Swiss stores were open, we went for months without things like lamps.

He had already been living in Geneva for a year and a half. Meanwhile, I had remained in London, where we’d met. The commute was tolerable, then tiring. In the spring of 2013, as our wedding approached, it was becoming a drag. Finally, that June, a visa fiasco abruptly forced me to leave England. Memoirs of immigration, like memories of immigration, often begin with a sense of approach—the ship sailing into the harbor, the blurred countryside through the windows of a train. My arrival in Geneva, on British Airways, was a perfect anticlimax, the modern ache of displacement anesthetized amid blank corridors of orange liqueur and fountain pens.

When Lord Byron arrived in Switzerland for an extended holiday in May 1816—fleeing creditors, gossips, and his wife, from whom he had recently separated, after likely fathering a child with his half sister—his entourage included a valet, a footman, a personal physician, a monkey, and a peacock. That summer he wrote The Prisoner of Chillon, the tale of a ­sixteenth-century Genevan monk, most of whose family has been killed in battle or burned at the stake. “There were no stars, no earth, no time / No check, no change, no good, no crime,” the poem reads. As a description of the local atmosphere, that seemed to me about right. Geneva was unlovely, but not hideous, as though no one had cared enough to do ugly with conviction. The city seemed suffused by complacency, as gray and costive as the clouds that hovered over Lac Léman. 

The main attraction was a clock made of begonias. Transportation was by tram. At the Office Cantonal de la ­Population, I was given a “Practical Guide to Living in Geneva,” ­ostensibly a welcome booklet. “It is forbidden and not well looked upon to make too much noise in your apartment between 21:00 and 07:00,” it read. “Also avoid talking too loudly, and shouting to call someone in public places.” The booklet directed me to a web page, which listed further gradations of bruit admissible (acceptable noise) and bruit excessif (excessive noise). Vacuuming during the day was okay, but God help the voluptuary who ran the washing machine after work.

Geneva had long been a place of asylum, but its tradition of liberty in the religious and political realms had never given rise to a libertine scene. Even though nearly half of the pop­ulation was foreign-born, the city remained resolutely uncosmopolitan, a tepid fondue of tearooms, confectionaries, and storefronts selling things like hosiery and lutes. Every block had its coiffeur, just as every coiffeur had its lone patroness, getting her hair washed in the sink. It wasn’t as though Genevans enjoyed the advantages of living in the countryside. Many of them, native and nouveau, had means. So why hadn’t some son or daughter of the city, after traveling to New York or Paris or Beirut—to Dallas or Manchester—been inspired to open a place where the bread didn’t come in a doily-lined wicker ­basket? Was there a dinkier phrase, in any language, than métropole lémanique?

After a month or so of heavy tramming, we decided to buy a car. We purchased insurance, which included coverage for theft, fire, natural disasters, and dommages causés par les ­fouines—damages caused by a type of local weasel. I traded in my American driver’s license for a Swiss one. The process took seventeen minutes flat. One sodden afternoon not long after, we trammed over to the Citroën lot.

Alexandre, a customer service representative, greeted us. He smelled of cigarettes and was wearing a tie.

“So, voici,” he said. (Switzerland has four official languages—German, French, Italian, and Romansh—and people tended to switch back and forth without warning, with varying degrees of success.) He led us to the car, a gray hatchback parked outside the office on a covered ramp.

It was pouring, each drop of rain a suicide jumper, hurling itself onto the ramp’s tin roof. We circled around the car, hoping to project a discerning vibe, as though any painted-over weasel damage would never get by us.

Olivier stopped on the car’s left side and, because it seemed like the thing to do, opened the backseat door.

“You will soon have des petits enfants?” Alexandre said.

“Um, we just got married.”

“Ah, bon? It was a Protestant or a Catholic ceremony?”

Our city hall wedding was an unimaginability for Alexandre. I was beginning to understand, only very slowly, that the city’s conservatism was neither an accident of demographics nor an oversight but an enactment of its founding values by conscious design. In 1387, more than a hundred years before the Catholic Church began to loosen its prohibitions on usury, the bishop of Geneva signed a charter of liberties, granting the genevois, alone in Christendom, the privilege of lending money at interest. The elite became financiers. The aspirant became Swiss mercenaries. Famed for their ferocity with the halberd and the pike, they poured cash into the economy in an era when most of the world’s population was getting paid in eggs.

The mentality had persisted: do your hell-raising—your eating in restaurants without doilies—abroad, and retreat to a place of imperturbable security. Voltaire wrote of Geneva, “There, one calculates, and never laughs.” Stendhal, passing through seventy years later, concluded that the genevois, despite their wealth and worldly networks, were at heart a parochial people: “Their sweetest pleasure, when they are young, is to dream that one day they will be rich. Even when they indulge in some imprudence and give themselves to pleasure, the ones they choose are rustic and cheap: a walk, to the summit of some mountain where they drink milk.” Monotony, then, was an economy. So that we could collectively accrue more capital, a curfew had been set.

Weekends were the worst. All of the shops closed at seven—except on Thursdays, when some of them closed at seven thirty—rendering Saturdays a dull frenzy of provisioning. Sundays were desolate, a relic of the Calvinist lockdown mentality that had sent the young Rousseau scrambling to Savoy. A relocation consultant furnished by Olivier’s company said that there had been talk of easing the Sunday moratorium, but to no avail. “Approximately ninety-nine percent of Swiss people support it,” he said, sounding to us approximately one hundred percent like a Swiss person.

Geneva had its graces—the trams operated on an honor system; even the graffiti artists were mannerly, defacing the sides of statues that didn’t face the street—but I took them as further proof that the city was second-rate. You could, of course, escape to any number of attractive places within driving range, and we passed many afternoons wandering the relatively bustling streets of Lyon. It seemed sad, though, that the main selling point of the place where we lived was its proximity to places where we’d rather live. And while the mountains that surrounded us were magnificent, the twenty-five or so times a year that we managed to take advantage of them didn’t make up for the three hundred and forty times we didn’t. On Sunday nights, after an outing, we’d return to our stockpiled supper and take out the recycling, casting bottles and cans into the maw of a public bin. This was our version of indulging in an imprudence: you could get fined for recycling—for recycling, I had not missed a negative adverb—on the day of rest.

Behind its orderly facade—the apartment buildings with their sauerkraut paint jobs; the matrons in furs; the brutalist plazas; the allées of pollarded trees—Geneva was, if anything, faintly sinister. Its vaunted sense of discretion seemed a cover for dodginess, bourgeois respectability masking a sleazy milieu. What was going on in those clinics and cabinets? Whose money, obtained by what means, was stashed in the private banks? What was a “family office,” anyway?

One day I received an e-mail from the Intercontinental Hotel Genève, entitled “What You Didn’t Know about Geneva.” I did not know that the Intercontinental Hotel Genève “continues to cater to the likes of the Saudi Royal family and the ruling family of the United Arab Emirates,” that the most expensive bottle of wine sold at auction was sold in Geneva (1947 Château Cheval Blanc, $304,375), that the most expensive diamond in the world was sold in Geneva (the Pink Star, a 59.6-carat oval-cut pink diamond, $83 million), or that Geneva “has witnessed numerous world records, such as the world’s longest candy cane, measuring 51 feet long.” I developed a theory I thought of as the Édouard Stern principle, after the French investment banker who was found dead in a penthouse apartment in Geneva—shot four times, wearing a flesh-colored latex catsuit, trussed. Read any truly tawdry news story, and Geneva will somehow play into it by the fifth paragraph. Balzac wrote that behind every great fortune lies a crime. In Switzerland, behind every crime seemed to lie a great fortune.

Around us Europe was reeling, but the stability of the Swiss franc, combined with the influx of people who sought to exploit it, made the city profoundly expensive. The stores were full of things we neither wanted nor could afford. I reacted by refusing to buy or do anything that I thought cost too much money, which was pretty much everything, and then complaining about my boredom. Geneva syndrome: becoming as tedious as your captor. The expanses of my calendar stretched as pristine as those of the Alps.

Olivier didn’t love Geneva either, but he didn’t experience it as an effacement. He said that it reminded him of a provincial French town in the 1980s—a setting and an epoch with which he was well acquainted, having grown up an hour outside Bordeaux during the Mitterrand years. His consolations were familiarities: reciting the call-and-response of francophone pleasantries with the women at the dry cleaners; reading Le Canard enchaîné, the French satirical newspaper, when it came out each Wednesday; watching the TV shows—many of them seemed to involve puppets—that he knew from home. He was living in a sitcom, with a laugh track and wacky neighbors. I was stranded in a silent film.

Videos