Mary Fleming and I first met through a friend, while I was teaching in Paris the spring of 2011. Charlie Trueheart, then director of the American Library in Paris, thought we’d get along and he organized a dinner at a restaurant next to a church near where they both lived. When Mary and I got together next, I met her golden-haired dog and I knew we would be friends for longer than that stay in Paris.
LF: As I recall, Mary, we met in Paris in the spring of 2011 and we had dinner near our friend Charlie Trueheart’s apartment. Charlie was then director of the American Library in Paris. I was teaching in Paris for the semester. That’s my first memory of meeting you. I liked you when we met and liked you even more when I met your big golden dog, who isn’t with us anymore, though you have another wonderful dog now. Proof of good character.
Later, I learned that you’d been in Paris for most of your adult life. Would you tell me your origin story—where you grew up and how you came to live in Paris? Of course I’m curious about your expectations of Paris when you were as new to the city as your heroine, Lily Owens.
MF: We ate at Le Square on the place Sainte Clothilde. Near both Charlie and us; in those days we lived right around the corner from one another.
I grew up first in Toronto, then Chicago. My father was Canadian and a real Anglophile. Maybe that influence is what kept me travelling east, first to Connecticut for high school and Maine for college, then to England for a junior year abroad that changed my life. I felt strangely at home there.
After college I went back to England for a summer, then to Provence to work as an English tutor and to pick grapes. I ran out of jobs and money and moved to New York. Eighteen months later I ended up in Paris with the man I’d met in England, and he became my first husband. I was twenty-four years old.
When I first arrived in 1981, I had a couple of years on Lily and less childhood baggage but we were equally uncertain about the future. My French was nowhere near as good as hers. Instead of taking a course in civilisation française at the Sorbonne, I learned on the job or various jobs: working in the back office of an investment firm, writing the English edition of a “telecommunications” (how quaint that sounds today) newsletter. I started doing some freelance journalism, mostly for a Paris-based magazine called Paris Passion. That led to other writing jobs.
Though I used to scribble bits of stories in my spare time, unlike Lily who discovers her love of cooking quickly, I did not seriously hear my calling until years later—three children and another husband. Better late than never.
LF: Civilisation Française is about two women at very different stages in their lives: Amenia Quinon at the very end, gathering memories and reflections as she moves toward blindness and her death. Her life in Paris is crucial to her character, the life she led in her beautiful, if dilapidated, home in the place des Vosges. Whereas Lily Owens is young and at the beginning. She feels lost and unsure of what she can do to make a life for herself. Lily hopes that being apart from her family will bring clarity and a sense of her own identity—and she has the hope that Paris will help her find herself.
When you began your life in Paris, did you have similar ideas and wishes as your two women?
And in your years in Paris have you often observed a similar journey, that is, women (and men) coming to Paris to see themselves, to find their true selves?
MF: Like Amenia Quinon, I came to Paris principally for love and marriage, even if I wasn’t as desperate to leave New York as she was to get off that ranch in Wyoming. But like Lily, I was quite a lost young person and hoping to discover some kind of true self. That hadn’t happened in New York, and Paris seemed a city of possibility. It still took a while, but I think – hope! – I found the real me.
Yes, I have known many people who came young to this city like me and my characters looking for direction or adventure or some combination of the two. Some left and some stayed. Why? Some, like Lily and I, feel it easier to be their true selves as an outsider in a society. The pressure to fit in is reduced. But that makes others unhappy and they leave.
More often, though, circumstance steps in and plays a determining role. My English friend Louise, for example, met her future French husband over a lost black cat (they kept the cat and named her Mademoiselle). My second husband David, who’d learned the language as a French summer camp counsellor, kept getting sent here by his law firm. During his second stint, both of us recently divorced, he met me and stayed.
In the case of Madame Quinon, history impaired what started off as a fairy tale life and marriage. Circumstances beyond her control – war, the German occupation of France – had a tragic effect on her and her family and defined who she ultimately became.
My broader point is that outside forces play a huge role in how life turns out no matter where you live.
LF: The themes of home and personal identity are central in Civilisation Française. For many women, making a home and making their way in the world are not a matter of choice. Many women have no choice in these matters. You’ve written an absorbing novel about two women who are able to make their own choices. How did you conceive of the themes and the characters who embody them? Or did the characters come first?
MF: I find that my themes are deep down inside me already, and they are in the characters who then embody them – or so I hope. One of the threads that runs through all my novels is how the past haunts the present. Amenia Quinon, whose life spans the twentieth century, made choices in her long life that she regrets. Now in her mid-eighties, it’s too late for her to go back, to attain a sense of redemption. Lily, on the other hand, is still young. Rather than trying to make up for past mistakes, she is hoping to move beyond a complicated childhood and parents whose love she has had more than enough reason to doubt. She takes the first steps on the path to becoming her own person, to distancing herself from her past, by finding her calling.
Then if you look at the house, the mansion on the place des Vosges in which much of the action takes place, and which I consider a character in her own right, I develop the theme of what constitutes home. As someone who, like Madame Quinon, has now spent most of her life in a country where she was not born the idea of what one calls ‘home’ pre-occupies me. The old house also evokes the theme of private property. By that I don’t mean whose name is on the deed but how where you live is the extension of yourself. It’s the physical protection between you and the outside world, our inner and outer selves. Managing the two – what goes on in our heads versus what we present to the world, how we relate or not to other people – is another important theme in my work and something I think about a lot.
LF: Both Henry James and Edith Wharton wrote about the marriages of Americans and Europeans. Your character Amenia Quinon lives her entire adult life within her husband’s French family. What are the issues that she as an American faced in that very French family as we see it in Civilisation Française?
What has changed in French life since Amenia Quinon’s time? Would a young American entering a French family find herself as challenged as Amenia was or would things be different in our more melded and global world? Finally—what is the source of your acute knowledge of life within a French family?
MF: On the one hand, Amenia Quinon’s Paris life was very luxurious. Before the Second World War, any family with means had a slew of servants. On the other she had to put up with rigid codes of behaviour: formal meals, deference to her difficult mother-in-law, care for her poisonous niece. Beyond that were her husband François’ snooty friends, whose company she offset by keeping a foot in the ex-pat community.
Much of the same (minus the servants) would have been true in the early 80s. Long Sunday lunches with the family, your mother-in-law very involved in your life. It was easy to keep these traditions alive. France was still an insular place. People didn’t travel much beyond the borders. Once I asked a friend why. He said: “There’s no need to travel. France has everything – culture, mountains, the sea, the forest, Northern Europe, Southern Europe – right here.” Not surprisingly, few spoke English well.
Now the French travel all over. Younger people learn English and feel comfortable abroad. Which means the rules have relaxed some, even if families remain close, spend holidays together, one generation with another. The mother-in-law is probably less judgmental than she would have been, but she’ll still take the kids for every school holiday.
During my first marriage, I knew a couple right out of the James-Wharton model. The husband was a French noble, the wife from a wealthy American family. His mother demanded that her daughter-in-law’s French be flawless. But there were differences. Both were bankers and despite appearances, they married for love, not social or economic advantage.
Most others learn to adjust, to appreciate the family closeness. Or they demand some distance be kept. It is easier to do that now that the French have seen more of the outside world.
As for my knowledge on the subject, I’ve been to enough French family events, heard enough stories over many years to understand it. My children grew up here, one of my sons has been with a French woman for almost 10 years. You just have to keep your eyes and ears open – the job of any novelist, non?
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Mary Fleming was born in Chicago and has lived in France for many years. After working as a journalist and consultant, she turned to fiction and has written three novels, Someone Else, The Art of Regret and the forthcoming Civilisation Française (July, Heliotrope Books.) Her bi-weekly photo-essay, A Paris-Perche Diary, tracks city and country (Normandy) life. Find her online at website: Mary Fleming Author, blog: A Paris Perche Diary, and Instagram: @flemingm6
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Laura Furman was born in New York City, and educated in public schools and at Bennington College. Her first story appeared in The New Yorker in 1976. Her work has appeared in Yale Review, Southwest Review, Ploughshares, The American Scholar, Subtropics, and other magazines. Her books include three collections of short stories, two novels,and a memoir. She’s the recipient of fellowships from the New York State Council on the Arts, Dobie Paisano Project, Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was Series Editor of The O.Henry Prize Stories 2002-2019. For many years, she taught writing and literature at the University of Texas at Austin. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.