On Leaving Brooklyn For Paris

How I sold my apartment, gave away my furniture and began a third act by getting on a plane.

Well hello! Hope you enjoy this new biweekly dispatch from Paris. It’s free, and it’s about what happens when you upend your life to be in the place you love even though it’s far from the people you love. And if you are a writer who likes Paris, join me for The Blue Hour, a six-day writing workshop in Paris this April.

 I’m writing to you from Canal St. Martin, a village-like neighborhood in the north of Paris. I showed up here in January with two suitcases and a small dog. I sold or gave away my furniture in Brooklyn, so I only took what I could carry off the plane.

On my first day here, sweet friends greeted me before dawn with bread, coffee, and what a cheese vendor called the perfect “welcome camembert.” And just like that, I was home. Of course, some part of me has been plotting a return to this city since I left decades ago at the tender age of 30.

But don’t mistake this for a bid to recapture lost youth. I don’t want to be young again, I want to be new again.  And by new, I mean I want to be a beginner again. I want to be out of my element.

I want to be humbled by waiters and two-letter words, cheese decisions, and the manuals for tiny French washing machines.

I want to be told by a stranger that I must not “murder” a bottle of champagne with the wrong stopper and laugh out loud. I want to assume everything here is about one kind of seduction or another and to be right half the time.

I want to try and be an adult with the vocabulary of a 4th grader and to see something perplexing or lovely every time I leave the house.

I want to be afraid that I leaped so far that the net won’t be able to catch me and I’ll fall in front of everyone. And I want to wrap that fear in the reciprocal hope that it’ll keep me grateful.

RELATED: Come write with me in Paris this Spring with The Blue Hour.

Sunrise on the Canal St. Martin

Of course, these dispatches will also be about Paris — the food, the flea markets, the light.  But I won’t be making lists of places to shop or hotels.  I want to share the delights and contradictions of being here and how discovering them can shake up an American soul. 

I’ll also tell you what happens when you run around town with a 21-pound spaniel in a country where dogs get served water in restaurants before I do. Tough guys stop in the streets and coo: “Il est trop!” (He’s too much!).  Department store clerks will cross a field of mattresses to whisper sweet nothings in his ear. It’s dog-calling instead of cat-calling.  And It’s magic, like having a personal ambassador.

I know this will all seem ordinary soon, so I’m holding onto the delicious oddness of seeing the world through a wacky cultural filter that tilts your perspective by about 60 degrees. Familiar elements are transformed by unfamiliar contexts. Everything seems right, and simultaneously, everything seems strange.

The great irony is that the brutally exhausting year of extricating myself from New York also forced me to see that city afresh. I had the same kind of beginner’s awe I now seek in Paris. I paid attention to Brooklyn’s charms in a way I hadn’t for years. I think it’s a kind of preemptive nostalgia. Like how you can love someone more acutely just after you break up. There’s a Portuguese concept that gets at this longing, this tender ache. They call it saudade. Sometimes I suspect that missing something can be sweeter than loving it.

The ride to JFK airport in January felt like peak saudade. My kids, Lars and Annika, drove me in Lars’ 1997 Volvo station wagon. Me in back, them in front. A new world order. My apartment sale was finalized that day, and I thought I’d be so relieved to get on the plane to Paris finally. No one was crying yet, but I wasn’t sure how long I’d last. Too late to turn back now, I gave away the sofa and the Instapot!

We hurtled along the Mad Max hellscape that is the Brooklyn Queens Expressway, a stretch of road that most truckers rate as the worst in the nation. There aren’t even painted lines to divide lanes, probably because no one pays attention to them anyway. From there, you emerge into the shocking serenity of the Belt Parkway, which swoops along New York Harbor. My mother’s people came into the country along that waterway, along with 12 million other immigrants.

The sun ricocheted off the water as we passed the Verrazano-Narrows bridge with its big gray shoulders. Janis Joplin was singing about freedom on a playlist made by my sublime Brooklyn-raised children. It made my chest ache—the scale of change, the history—ours and everyone’s, the unexpected loveliness, and the leaving.  

That’s the thing about New York: It is a symphony of bone-rattling contrasts. It slaps you with some aesthetic horror, then delivers magnificence to ensure you don’t forget it.

Suddenly, there we were, a little triad of a family in the vast fluorescent cavern of JFK, weepy and exhausted from months of hauling our lives out of the old apartment into the street, into storage, into other homes. All of us at the intersection of our own before and after. Act 3 for me, Act 2 for them. 

We got to the security line, and Annika said: “Mom, it’s like you’re going to study abroad!” We laughed. And then I walked away wearing a long orange wool coat like a neon caution sign,  plus a backpack containing something even more cliche than an an American who loves Paris: a cosseted little dog. 

P.S. Come write with me in Paris this Spring! Check out The Blue Hour

The not “Hermes orange” coat at JFK, and the welcome camembert

A note to longtime subscribers: Please forgive my long absence. This last year of unraveling one life to build another took everything I had. I couldn’t do the newsletter, but I did take notes and photos. So stay tuned, and thanks for your patience.