Sharon Harrigan

Author Website

By

Lost in Translation: Your House Is Homely But Your Daughter Is Delicious

Yesterday, on the way to the apartment of this week’s host for our French-English conversation group, I passed a Laura Ashley boutique with a window display that said : “Make Your Christmas Homely.” When I mentioned this to my group, only the anglophone half laughed. “Homely means ugly,” I explained. Laid. Moche. They were shocked and said they use this word as a compliment all the time. Each francophone grabbed her phone, making a frantic note. They are eager to perfect their English because it is the language of business. One of the people in my group is an architect, I can only imagine how often she’s told clients she will transform their apartments into something truly homely.

Be Fruit. Be City. Be Rock. This is what the window display of a children’s store on my block says. This construction: Be [a weird noun, instead of an adjective] is common here. It’s as if saying anything in English makes it automatically cool, even if it doesn’t make any sense.

A French woman in my group was describing a wedding she’d attended. The bride was delicious, she said, and when the angophones pointed out that this adjective has sexual innuendo, all the francophones were mortified. In French, the word means charming, so they assumed it meant the same thing in English. I can imagine the reaction of American mothers, hearing male teachers call their teenager daughters “delicious.”

An international family moved from Switzerland and then Germany before coming to Paris and sending their children to a private American school here. When they got an e-mail from the guidance counselor, saying their son is “a pleasure,” they were sure the man was a sexual predator. Once they met him, they realized they just weren’t used to the perhaps uniquely American practice of telling students how great they are.

The trilingual father of one of my daughter’s friends shared this trick: Whenever he’s unsure of a phrase, he types it into Google. If multiple links appear, the phrase is probably colloquial. If not, he tries something else. That’s what I’ll do next time I write an e-mail, before I accidentally call someone I’m really trying to impress the French equivalent of a homely, delicious fruit.

By

Paris Journal: Remembering Anne-Marie Albiach

The great French poet Anne-Marie Albiach died on Sunday, after a protracted illness. Anglophones may know her work from the superb translations by Joseph Simas, Lydia Davis, or Rosemarie Waldrop, or from essays by Paul Auster, Norma Cole, or Alan Davies. Her most famous books are Etat and Mezza Voce, and her work has been called “poesie blanche,” or white poetry, because of its tendency towards abstraction and nonnarrative sense.

I met Anne-Marie when I was twenty, living in France for six months, as part of Columbia’s junior year abroad program. The poets George and Chris Tysh introduced me (long distance) to the expatriate American poet Joseph Simas, who in turn led me to Anne-Marie. Soon I found myself working for her, doing her shopping and errands, accompanying her on medical visits, and, most important, providing her company during the evenings when her panic was at its worst. She read my poems and pronounced them “very American,” and never before or since have I felt my nationality so acutely.

She was a famous recluse, but she held court in her apartment in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris, where I was often allowed to crash dinner parties with literary legends I was too young and naive to be as intimidated by as I would be now. In my memory, we served the same meal to everyone: an entree of radishes, fromage blanc, and fresh herbs; lamb chops broiled with fresh rosemary for the plat; salad; strong, stinky, delicious, soft munster cheese; wine and bread, of course; coffee, and sometimes vodka at the very end. She didn’t drink but liked to try to get me drunk, perhaps because I seemed so straight laced. When I first returned to France a few months ago, I felt a compulsion to make this meal again and again, as if in her honor.

She was a figure larger than life. A woman whom followers made pilgrimages to visit. Mysterious and haunting on the page and in person, her art so elegant, logical, spare, and austere it almost disappeared. So essentially what I think of as “French” (the way she thought of me as “American”) that France doesn’t seem the same now, without her.

By

Paris Journal: My Binder of Women

Yesterday we were dining at a Vietnamese restaurant at Place d’Italie, the Chinatown of Paris. Two tables away, a young attractive woman prepared her date’s Pho, fastidiously placing sprouts, greens, peppers, and lemon juice in his bowl of broth and meat. He held a large cell phone in front of her face and texted the entire time. Even if the message had been urgent, he could have placed the phone discreetly in his lap. At that moment, I was embarrassed to be a woman.

I was reminded of the time someone pulled me aside and told me that my husband had a perspiration stain on his tie. She said, “Don’t bring it to his attention. That would just embarrass him. When he’s at work one day, discreetly take it to the dry cleaner, then replace it in the drawer, and he’ll never be the wiser.” I’m not proud to say that there have been times when I’ve internalized the idea that women’s work should be invisible and unacknowledged.

The situation for women in France is both better and worse than in America. Birth control is readily available, as is daycare and maternity leave. But officials address us by our husband’s first name, and we’re expected to wear heels even while traversing the entire city.

My husband calls my daughter’s school here “the land feminism forgot.” So many of the families came here for the husband’s job, and he is the only one who has a work permit. The school is full of highly educated women who cannot legally work and who, predictably, become very involved in school activities. At the parent association meetings, the speakers use the feminine plural, which is only grammatically correct when there are zero men. I’m reminded what it must have been like for my mother’s and grandmother’s generation.

Maybe it’s the election season, with its pandering and slandering of women, that made me especially sensitive to these situations. I am in no position to pass judgment on anyone’s choices, since I have been in almost every role: sole breadwinner, stay-at-home mother, freelancer, and full-time staffer. I’m convinced we need to stick together, as women, instead of justifying our choices by berating those of others.

I could fill this binder with a book’s worth of portraits, but I’ll close with one of the kind of woman I’d like to be, several decades from now. Yesterday, I spent the day with Aimée, the seventy-year-old mother of my one of my friends. (Note to all my other friends: Even if you can’t make it to Paris, send me your parents.) Aimée is traveling around Europe by herself, because she is, as my friend said, “the definition of plucky.” We walked from St. Germain des Pres to Etoile, then back to the Louvre, through rooms and rooms of antiquities, Renaissance paintings, and Egyptian treasures. I was the one who finally begged to stop for food and rest. She is an avid hiker, so it was natural for her to walk the streets of Europe instead of taking tours, and when I saw her she was on her fourth country. Every half hour or so, she would look at me and say, “I can’t believe I’m actually in Paris!” I admired her childlike wonder and enthusiasm, her perseverance and intrepidity (not cancelling the trip just because her traveling companion got sick at the last minute). She made me proud to be a woman.

By

Paris Journal: Strange Food

Ella shuffled through a cookbook on our bookshelf, left by one of the former tenants. “Can we make brains today?” she asked. “Tongue?” No and no, I said. “Whole steamed fish?” she asked. “Maybe,” I said. “But I don’t know if the fishmonger cleans out the guts for you here in France. It’s not like in America.”

In the several butcher shops on our block and in the open-air markets held in our quartier twice a week, rabbits, unrefrigerated like so much else, hang with everything except their fur, their eyes and paws intact, looking like they are going to jump into a bush and hide. Chickens often don’t lose their heads, keeping also their claws and remnants of feathers. Crabs will scurry when poked, as will large shrimps. And yes, we nudge them a little, sometimes, because everybody else does. I searched a French foodie blog for instructions for cooking live gambas, a kind of large shrimp. The site recommended I saute them while still alive. Alternatively, I could guillitine their wriggling necks. Watching a YouTube video is as close as I’ll get to that French historical ritual.

I’m going to tell you something I’m not proud of: I am more squeamish than my nine-year-old daughter. I watch the rest of my family order blood sausage at a restaurant, foie gras (and liver of most other description), and I discreetly pass.. I tried escargot, though. Once. And how was I rewarded? At the dinner table, my throat started to hurt. My swallowing became painful, my air barely escaping through my mouth. Later, I realized I wasn’t inflicted with an abrupt case of tonsilitis. I discovered my only allergy ever: to snails, otherwise known as slugs, a kind of garden pest I used to pull off my vegetables between my thumb and index finger. I can’t help thinking my body was rejecting this foreign object because it was, well, so strange.

I’ll give in to Ella’s begging for tete de veau (cow’s head, pictured above, in its uncooked form) at a restaurant, but it is not something I will try at home. Really, I think the cookbook should come with a disclaimer

By

Paris Journal: Small Dogs and Big Apartments

There’s another kind of desire in the air here, and it has nothing to do with lingerie in display windows. It’s house lust.

I thought I’d happily left all that behind when I moved from New York City. In Charlottesville, land is plentiful enough that housing is affordable. But in Paris, as in Manhattan and Brooklyn, space is scarce (which explains the phenemonon of microscopic dogs). I find myself peeking into real estate office windows, despite myself.

It’s not that I don’t love our cozy Paris apartment, with an amour almost fou. I adore the bustling, residential neighborhood, far enough from the tourist throngs to be authentic, yet close enough to be convenient. The rooms are small but adequate, and the decor is bohemian/scholarly/chic. In other words, perfect. It is a privilege bordering on miraculous that I get to live here. It’s just that, now that I’ve seen other people’s apartments, I hesitate to invite them to my own.

I’ve been in only two apartments so far, one for playdates, one for conversation group meetings. Both are grand spaces, full of huge windows and living rooms like museum halls.  Both are in the sixteenth arondissement, which my guidebook tells me is one of the toniest quartiers in the city, near the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian equivalent of Central Park. But I’ve talked to enough parents to imagine that such spaces are typical for families at my daughter’s school. Even though it is inexpensive by New York (or even Charlottesville) standards, since it is subsidized by the government, it’s still private.

We’ve hosted out-of-town guests but have not yet entertained any Parisians. Tomorrow will be the first time. “Our apartment is small,” I cautioned the mother of Ella’s friend, feeling ridiculous for doing so. In her smile I imagined her saying that size doesn’t matter. Except, of course, for dogs.