Summary

Pages ix - 8—Author Eloisa James begins her memoir with a remembrance of her running away from home at age eight and a comparison of that experience to her year in Paris, calling Paris another attempt to run away from home. Being a professor, she asserts that the whole point of her year in Paris is that she learned “something about the art of living” that she had tossed aside years before (xi). The opening sentence of her introduction sets up the premise of the memoir: “In December 2007, my mother died of cancer; two weeks later I was diagnosed with the same disease” (3). It does not, however, set a tone of despair as one might expect. Rather than digress into morbid thoughts of someone else rearing her children and all the things she would...