French Lessons: A Memoir

"[A] cultural odyssey, a brave attempt to articulate the compulsions that drove [Kaplan] to embrace foreignness in order to become truly herself." —The Washington Post Book World

Brilliantly uniting the personal and the critical, French Lessons is a powerful autobiographical experiment. It tells the story of an American woman escaping into the French language and of a scholar and teacher coming to grips with her history of learning.

In spare, midwestern prose, by turns intimate and wry, K...