Lucy Wadham offers here a rich and spicy recollection of her life among her parents, colorful sisters, eccentric grandmother, and uncles in London during the 1970s and 1980s. 

One of the passages that I delighted in reading was the following:
“Eileen’s [the author’s maternal grandmother, who was a free spirit and a pioneer feminist] love of Virginia Woolf was all-encompassing. It embraced not only the woman’s work but also her prejudices: the championing of Art above Commerce and the belief in Beauty as a portal to Truth. She passed on Woolf’s love of nature to us, teaching us the names of trees and flowers, an old world knowledge that would make us ridiculous to future boyfriends. Her cure for birds that fell from their nests was a short spell in her bra. I’ll never forget the sight of a revived baby blackbird flying out of her bosom.

“… Our grandmother’s Edwardian English made us squeal with laughter. When we were with her, pronunciation seemed to be a constant trap lying in wait for us. However you thought something should be pronounced, for Gran it was the opposite. The mountain range should be pronounced ‘Himarlias’, with the accent on the second syllable. You were supposed to pronounce necessarily and customarily and all the ‘airily’ words with the stress on the first syllable and when she read to us, she would roll her ‘r’s’, say nardays for nowadays and whenever for whenever.”

This is the second Lucy Wadham book that I've read and enjoyed. She has a knack for crafting the well-turned phrase that conveys so much to the reader in terms of a person's emotional state, her older sister Fly's struggles with a heroin addiction, the atmosphere in a club in Chelsea, or the large house in Kensington where Wadham lived with a host family whose head was a peer in the House of Lords. At 95 pages, this book represents one of the most rewarding and quickest reading experiences I've had thus far this year. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

As a confirmed Francophile, I ABSOLUTELY LOVED THIS BOOK, from which I learned so much more about the cultural mores of France.

Wadham herself had been married to a Frenchman for close to 20 years, with whom she had 4 children (all of them educated in the French educational system), and, though divorced, continues to live and work in France. While shedding insight into French attitudes toward religion, politics, education, race, relationships, history (France continues to be very conflicted about its wartime behavior under the German Occupation), the French language, the law, and the nation itself, she intersperses the book with some of her own experiences with her French family and friends, which also gives the book the feel of a diary and an anthropological case study. Further, Wadham's contrasts of French attitudes with comparable Anglo Saxon cultural norms and practices (as exemplified by Britain and America) I found both startling and intriguing.

(I have twice visited Paris, and though my French is very far from fluent, I had not met with any outward shows of derision or contempt from any Parisians I encountered during my daily pereginations in the city.)


For the reader of this review, I'd like to cite 2 passages from the book, which may give you food for thought ---


"Television is [for the British] ... a medium naturally given to the worship of reality. In line with our love of reality and our taste for the comic over the tragic, the British are excellent watchers and makers of television. The French, on the other hand, with their love of grand ideas and their contempt for reality, make execrable television. Hours of French airtime are devoted to the spectacle of people (anybody will do) sitting around discussing ideas. There is none of the British mistrust of 'talking heads'. Talking heads are seen as a good thing in France, and the louder they talk the better."

"It is strange to me to watch my own children struggling, for the first time, with the very facets of their own culture that I found so infuriating when I first arrived twenty-three years ago. While they were growing up, I was blind to my own influence upon them. They seemed to me so wonderfully French that I would never have guessed that their Englishness would one day come and bite me on the bottom. Now that they're getting ready to leave for England, I find myself buried so deeply in this culture that I doubt I can ever escape it. France has swallowed me up, but not my children.

"My relationship with France began with my relationship with Laurent. When the marriage ended, I assumed that my link to France would lessen in intensity. I was no longer speaking French all hours of the day, dreaming in French, arguing in French, loving in French. I thought I was no longer bound to this place. My children were grown up, so I could now choose: England or France. And then I discovered that I didn't want to leave. I know France now and in knowing her, I love her. Like the long-suffering spouse who realises, after all those years, that in spite of everything, there is no one in the world she would rather be with. I adore and despise this country in equal measure."

Here is a cross-section of books for any bibliophile with wanderlust.   HAPPY READING.