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A review by aasplund
How to Make a French Family: A Memoir of Love, Food, and Faux Pas by Samantha Verant
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
slow-paced
2.0
Most of the time I was reading this book, I couldn't stop thinking about this song from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. The most pertinent line to this book goes If you saw a movie that was like real life, you'd be like, 'What the hell was that movie about? It was really all-over-the-place.' Life doesn't make narrative sense. And that's kind of how I felt about this book. It kind of just felt like the author was narrating the last three years of her life. And that doesn't make for a good read.
It probably also doesn't help that I just finished [b:Educated|35133922|Educated|Tara Westover|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1506026635s/35133922.jpg|53814228] and [b:Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood|29780253|Born a Crime Stories From a South African Childhood|Trevor Noah|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473867911s/29780253.jpg|50150838] - two very excellent memoirs that would be difficult to measure up to.
But reading so many memoirs recently gave me some good comparisons for why this one was so boring. And there are a lot of reasons.
1. The author didn't really do anything that interesting. Okay, so she reconnected with an old flame and moved to France. All that happens in the first few pages of the book. And the rest of it is about her being a housewife in France and adjusting to that. And there's isn't that much to tell. Most memoirs just skip most of the boring bits and skip to interesting stories. Or they find a couple significant aspects of their life and focus on how those develop. For Trevor Noah, it was his mom. A lot of Tara Westover's book focused on her experiences with her older brother and the role of education in changing her life. I'm not entirely sure what this author was focusing on. This book was basically a day-by-day retelling of all the boring, everyday family things that happened to this woman in France. And she even included loads of really dull dialogue and meaningless conversations instead of sticking to funny or interesting things that had happened.
2. What's the mood of this book? The author spends about a chapter talking about how her first couple months in France were an adjustment and how getting to know her stepchildren was awkward sometimes. And those are emotions and experiences that are to be expected in her situation. However, the way the author referenced back to her first couple months in France didn't fit with her initial description of it. Most of this book is about how perfect her life in France is (and don't worry, we'll get to that in a minute) - but then there are constantly these random asides about how much she's overcome and how she's never going back to how unhappy and scared she was in the beginning. She adjusted to a new country - yeah, that's a big deal. But the way she talked about her initial experiences felt really inconsistent and didn't fit in most of the places they were put. Also, it's mentioned way too much. At least every other chapter, there's a paragraph about how much more comfortable in France she is now because it was so bad at first blah blah blah. It was repetitive and inconsistent. And it drove me nuts.
3. No one's life is that perfect. The author details her experience with a very serious trial in this book - infertility and miscarriages. She does a good job of being open about her emotions regarding her experiences and that was honestly my favorite part of the book. Partly because it was the only part of her experiences that felt real and relatable. Most of this book is about how perfect the author's life is - with minor inconveniences periodically. She even makes a point of telling the reader that she has sex with her husband every night - why do we need to know this? And it's delivered in the weirdest way possible - the author asks her husband if he thinks they'll be able to start trying to get pregnant again after a miscarriage and the husband answers, "Well, yeah. We have sex every night, after all." And while that was the most egregious, there were a lot of little lines like that- just to remind you how perfect her life is in case you forgot. And they're stuck in the weirdest places. The daily sex comment comes after some serious pain and vulnerability on the author's part - and it's supposed to look like this sweet and comforting, yet kind of silly thing her husband says in the middle of her pain. Things like that ruin the moment and are really jarring. It could have been that the author still hurting enough from the miscarriages to talk about them much - which I could completely understand. But then why write a memoir?
There's a lot of this book that didn't make sense to me. This is, at best, a mildly charming memoir about some faux pas in the French language. But it was mostly really boring.
It probably also doesn't help that I just finished [b:Educated|35133922|Educated|Tara Westover|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1506026635s/35133922.jpg|53814228] and [b:Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood|29780253|Born a Crime Stories From a South African Childhood|Trevor Noah|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1473867911s/29780253.jpg|50150838] - two very excellent memoirs that would be difficult to measure up to.
But reading so many memoirs recently gave me some good comparisons for why this one was so boring. And there are a lot of reasons.
1. The author didn't really do anything that interesting. Okay, so she reconnected with an old flame and moved to France. All that happens in the first few pages of the book. And the rest of it is about her being a housewife in France and adjusting to that. And there's isn't that much to tell. Most memoirs just skip most of the boring bits and skip to interesting stories. Or they find a couple significant aspects of their life and focus on how those develop. For Trevor Noah, it was his mom. A lot of Tara Westover's book focused on her experiences with her older brother and the role of education in changing her life. I'm not entirely sure what this author was focusing on. This book was basically a day-by-day retelling of all the boring, everyday family things that happened to this woman in France. And she even included loads of really dull dialogue and meaningless conversations instead of sticking to funny or interesting things that had happened.
2. What's the mood of this book? The author spends about a chapter talking about how her first couple months in France were an adjustment and how getting to know her stepchildren was awkward sometimes. And those are emotions and experiences that are to be expected in her situation. However, the way the author referenced back to her first couple months in France didn't fit with her initial description of it. Most of this book is about how perfect her life in France is (and don't worry, we'll get to that in a minute) - but then there are constantly these random asides about how much she's overcome and how she's never going back to how unhappy and scared she was in the beginning. She adjusted to a new country - yeah, that's a big deal. But the way she talked about her initial experiences felt really inconsistent and didn't fit in most of the places they were put. Also, it's mentioned way too much. At least every other chapter, there's a paragraph about how much more comfortable in France she is now because it was so bad at first blah blah blah. It was repetitive and inconsistent. And it drove me nuts.
3. No one's life is that perfect. The author details her experience with a very serious trial in this book - infertility and miscarriages. She does a good job of being open about her emotions regarding her experiences and that was honestly my favorite part of the book. Partly because it was the only part of her experiences that felt real and relatable. Most of this book is about how perfect the author's life is - with minor inconveniences periodically. She even makes a point of telling the reader that she has sex with her husband every night - why do we need to know this? And it's delivered in the weirdest way possible - the author asks her husband if he thinks they'll be able to start trying to get pregnant again after a miscarriage and the husband answers, "Well, yeah. We have sex every night, after all." And while that was the most egregious, there were a lot of little lines like that- just to remind you how perfect her life is in case you forgot. And they're stuck in the weirdest places. The daily sex comment comes after some serious pain and vulnerability on the author's part - and it's supposed to look like this sweet and comforting, yet kind of silly thing her husband says in the middle of her pain. Things like that ruin the moment and are really jarring. It could have been that the author still hurting enough from the miscarriages to talk about them much - which I could completely understand. But then why write a memoir?
There's a lot of this book that didn't make sense to me. This is, at best, a mildly charming memoir about some faux pas in the French language. But it was mostly really boring.