Monsieur Mediocre

A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don't get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer. John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he's finally ready to admit his mother's Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris--not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad. Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France--to its absurdities, its history, its ideals--but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.

John von Sothen is an American columnist living in Paris, where he covers entertainment and society issues for French Vanity Fair. Von Sothen has written for both the American and French GQ, Slate, Technikart, Libération, and The New York Observer; he has written for TV at Canal+ and MTV; and he is now penning a column for the political site Mediapart. Von Sothen often does voice-overs in English for French perfumes and luxury brands, occasionally performs stand-up comedy at The New York Comedy Night in the SoGymnase Comedy Club in Paris (in French and English), and is a routine guest on the French radio station Europe 1 discussing all things US related.