MFCH Staff Favorite Books About Life in France
© Olivia Hoffman
These stories are the ones expats and dreamers keep coming back to. And of course, our team has their own version of that collection.
Some are decades-old icons, others came recommended by a friend. What they share is a real sense of what it takes to build a life here. In this month’s edition of MFCH Staff Favorites, the team shares the books that shaped how they see France: memoirs by American women from the 1950s to the 2020s, cartoons sketched from Paris café terraces, a wartime saga set in the French countryside, a coffee-table ode to the Basque coast, a graphic account of two lives lived in the same Belleville apartment, a fumbling attempt to learn the language.
Here are our favorite books about life in France.
“My Life in France” by Julia Child
Recommended by Jessy, MFCH Customer Service Manager
I think Julia Child speaks to so many of us who find respite in French culture. I read My Life in France for the first time while still living in Maine and flipping through the pages at home made me feel a little closer to my dreams abroad.
Julia, a girl from New England herself, famously won the hearts of her French peers while studying at the Cordon Bleu in the early 50s. She was the only woman in a room and proved her place all while struggling to learn the language. She was a pioneer for those she once called “servantless cooks,” and published the greatest American ode to French cooking.
My Life in France reveals the twists and turns of finding an identity elsewhere, and turns an eye away from the kitchen, toward the woman who challenged and changed the American palette forever.
“Sempé’s Paris” by Jean-Jacques Sempé
Recommended by Nicola, MFCH Magazine Editor & Writer
I first fell in love with the work of Jean-Jacques Sempé in the pages of The New Yorker magazine. As a suburban girl, I found his playful and poetic depictions of the city to be a kind of Rosetta Stone for understanding modern urban life. When life brought me to Paris years later, I was delighted to experience, once again, the feeling that I was walking through a real-life Sempé cartoon — and struck by the genius of his drawings and the keenness of his observations.
Sempé’s pen magically captured the atmosphere of the city’s cafés and boulevards, its majestic parks and wrought-iron balconies. His renderings of people, young and old, always felt distinctly French, no tourists to be seen. And the dogs — walking on leashes, sitting under restaurant tables, accompanying their owners in parks — seemed to function like little witnesses to an entire way of life.
Sempé’s characters are elegant, romantic, a little bit ridiculous and all faintly bourgeois. He gently skewers their foibles without ever losing his affection for them. I think that’s what gives his work a distinctively French sensibility. Long before Instagram made French life into an aesthetic, Jean-Jacques Sempé understood its appeal. His Paris can’t be reduced to a postcard. It’s a whole vibe.
Many years ago, a friend gifted me a copy of Sempé’s Paris, just as a work assignment was about to send me to Asia for a couple of years. While I was away, it sat on my coffee table, quietly reminding me of the world I had left behind — and beckoning me to return.
“The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah
Recommended by Sharon, MFCH Founder & Editor-in-Chief
The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah is set in WWII France during the German occupation and follows two sisters whose lives are torn apart by the war.
Vianne is the older sister, quietly trying to survive in her small village in the Loire Valley while her husband is sent to the front. She does everything she can to keep her daughter safe and her head down, accommodating the occupiers even when it costs her deeply. Over time she becomes involved in hiding Jewish children, an act of quiet, terrifying courage that unfolds slowly and costs her dearly.
Isabelle is her younger sister, more rebellious, who refuses to accept the occupation and throws herself into the French Resistance. She eventually becomes a courier for an escape network, guiding stranded Allied airmen over the Pyrenees into Spain on foot in winter conditions. She operates under the code name “The Nightingale.”
I loved this novel that talks of the experience of women in wartime France and reminds us that there were many forms of resistance and many forms of courage during that devastating time.
“Biarritz Basque” by Assouline
Recommended by Alizée, MFCH Travel & Tours Manager
For a favorite book about France, I have to choose one that takes me back to a region I particularly love: Biarritz Basque by Assouline.
I’ve always loved Assouline books. They’re beautifully made, full of color and the sort of books you want to leave out and pick up every now and then. This one is particularly special to me because the Basque Country is one of my favorite regions in France. The photography is stunning, and I love flicking through the pages, recognizing places I know while also discovering more about the region, its history and culture.
It’s also simply a beautiful object. The bright red cover brings so much color to my coffee table, and every time I see it, it makes me want to go back to Biarritz.
“Scaffolding” by Lauren Elkin
Recommended by Maddy, MFCH Magazine Editor & Writer
When a friend lent me her copy of this book, I wasn’t expecting it to be a read that would linger in my mind for many months after.
The story follows two couples living in the same apartment in Paris’s Belleville neighborhood, one in 2019 and the other in the 1970s. It’s one of those books where nothing exactly “happens,” even as the characters deal with life’s different complications, from apartment renovations to miscarriage and cheating. And yet, these personal dramas never feel like the focus of the story. Instead, it is the description of the city, the realities of life here and how that changes — for better or worse — that seem to be under the microscope.
From the achingly familiar depiction of small talk at the local bakery, to observing Lacan’s lectures on psychology, to witnessing the inner workings of the group of feminists who splash their messages all over Paris, the book explores how its characters are shaped by the city itself. The result is a rare and unromanticized view into life in the capital, made all the more precious for its authenticity and poignant simplicity.
“Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris
Recommended by Sarah, MFCH Box & Boutique Manager
If you have ever fumbled through a French conversation, been humbled by a government form, or wondered how anyone survives the process of becoming French, this book is for you. David Sedaris moves to Normandy with his partner, and what follows is one of the most honest and perceptive accounts of expat life in France you will come across. His reckoning with the French language in particular is both painful and absolutely hilarious.
As an American living in Paris, I found myself nodding along to almost every page. Sedaris has a way of finding the absurdity in everyday situations that anyone who has navigated life in France will immediately recognize. Witty, self-deprecating, and sharper than he lets on — it’s the kind of book you pick up with the intention of reading a chapter and end up finishing the whole book.
A perfect read for anyone who loves France, lives here, or has ever dreamed of making the move.
“The French Ingredient” by Jane Bertch
Recommended by Olivia, MFCH Magazine Editor, Writer, and Brand Strategist
Falling in love with Paris can be bittersweet, especially for an expat determined to make it work. Between the trials and tribulations, though, there’s magic and beauty to be found at every turn — and in her relatable memoir, Jane Bertch, a fellow Chicagoan, captures that dichotomy perfectly.
Jane’s story begins with a vow to steer clear of France, made after a first visit right out of high school. Years later, the American bank she was working for in London sent her to Paris, and she fell for the city — ultimately leaving the finance world to open a cooking school, despite having no professional cooking experience. The French Ingredient is an honest portrayal of the daily challenges every foreigner faces when moving to France, laced with advice and humor as Jane takes readers through her entrepreneurial journey and life as an expat in Paris.
Jane and I have crossed paths a few times now. We first met in 2012, on my very first visit to Paris, when my mom and I took an eclair-making class at her cooking school, La Cuisine de Paris. A decade later, once I’d moved to Paris myself, we reconnected — and her words made me, and I’m sure many others, feel seen in the pursuit of chasing a dream that once seemed crazy.
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