French Women Don’t Get Fat, by Mireille Guiliano

The recent “discovery” that French people are, sacrebleu, actually capable of getting fat if they happen to eat tons of fast food–combined with the hangover that crippled me for 24 hours after my brilliant and beautiful friend May’s wedding–prompted me to buy and read this book, which was lying out on a table in a used book store in Charleston. French Women Don’t Get Fat is still atop the bestseller lists (apparently #3 on the Times list of “hardcover advice books”) and the “French paradox” (in which French women eat cheese, wine and pastries and yet are not disgusting fat people) still crops up in the news with decent frequency. This book, says Guiliano and the rest of the world, has a secret that might as well be made of gold: “the secret of eating for pleasure.”

The secret of eating for pleasure. 

What they really mean is: the secret of eating for the kind of pleasure that is slow, intelligent, psychologically healthy, and well-earned by compensatory sacrifices. Which, as far as food goes, is the kind of pleasure that I do personally prefer–but let’s be precise about these words. Pleasure is not only homemade yogurt and halibut en papillote. Pleasure involves lots of things, like finishing an entire block of cheese. When I bury my face in airport Chinese or go to the taco truck at 10:45 AM or cram my mouth with a post-wedding brisket sandwich while my blacked-out boyfriend repeatedly tells me that “that sandwich smells exactly like poop,” that’s pleasure if I’ve ever tasted it.

As far as the actual advice? Like all sensible diet and lifestyle advice, it’s easy and obvious. Don’t binge. If you binge, compensate. Try not to ever be starving or stuffed. Walk more. Eat more fruit and vegetables. Cook more. Guiliano adds a few more-French tidbits that reminded me of how my belle amie Lola did things during Peace Corps: set your table, enjoy the sensory aspects of preparing and eating a meal, serve things in courses, go to the market, talk about your food (but never feel guilty).

Sound advice, all of it, and as such this isn’t really a diet book. But I tire of the fatness thing. There are some reasons for fatness that evoke my sympathy (being extremely poor is at the root of all of the reasons) but the female binge/purge/guilt cycle that this book is aimed at is not one of them. So yeah, are you getting a muffin top? Is your bikini body not on par to be one of Star magazine’s top 100? Move to Houston, where there’s a functioning economy, and walk my dog in the heat at noon. The pounds will melt off. And I will thank you.

People are Unappealing (Even Me), by Sara Barron

I read this right after reading Sloane Crosley’s newest book, How Did You Get This Number, and it blew Crosley so far out of the water that I’m now in Barron-camp for good. This was unexpected, because I’m a big fan of Sloane Crosley, loved I Was Told There’d Be Cake, and maintain a vast store of jealous admiration for Crosley and her career and her intriguing conventionality–but How Did You Get This Number is full of mundane travel essays and one too many un-clever phrases like “the taking of the drugs,” and despite a heart-tugging final chapter, it lost me.

Sara Barron, on the other hand, had me in out-loud giggles all the way through. She seems almost ego-less, which is remarkable for a young female memoirist, and she immediately goes plunging through her life for amazing snippets of personal folly and humiliation. She’s assigned to play an Asian character in a school play: “As someone pinkish and pale and covered in moles, I do not look Asian. My associations to the continent are limited to the facts that I eat a lot of sashimi and that in the early ’00s I got a case of HPV from a Vietnamese sculptor named Quong.” She writes about how her entire elementary school witnesses her first-lady-cycle pad bulge and starts chanting “Chick with a dick! Chick with a dick!” She finds a diary from elementary school filled not with heartfelt musings on the everyday, but with sentences like this:

“I swichted myself around so my head was right on his pienus and I made my legs go into a squatting position and made so he exactly saw up my viginia. So I am lying on top of him and he is humping me so hard I’m nearly flying off him. Then I take his pienus and rub my face and in it.”

Barron had premature misconceptions about sex: that “pienuses” were shaped like hooks, that coitus was always followed by champagne, and that an erection prevented sex–however, “enough experience with enough alcoholics, and you cultivate a fine appreciation of the item/event.”

Other topics: trichitillomania, dating a gay guy, asking a black guy to “lay his chocolate skin beside her white vagina” (the guy just pees on her), bartending at Coyote Ugly, going on an online date with a midget, finding an ex-boyfriend who has made it a life calling to be a clown, hanging out with Paris Hilton. It’s all so funny. It’s exhaustingly funny, by the end. But Sloane Crosley fans, if you’re the type of person that knows you’re weird, this is the book for you.

The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

Paula McLain, the author of The Paris Wife, is a poet with an MFA degree. I don’t like to say that this explains a lot about the way her novel is written, because what do I know? But such are my suspicions when I read her long sentences–run-ons are so emotional, like Ulysses, yes I said yes I said “and” and “and” and “and” until the text has absorbed all my narrator’s feelings! I can hear the MFA in her vaguely-angled, off-to-infinity endings, all soaked in the type of imagery that comes straight from a writer’s learned subconscious once they’ve absorbed 10000 short stories that all end in some lessened version of The Great Gatsby‘s “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Take this, for example, which is in the introduction: “And the tea will boil in the teapot, and I’ll tell a story about a girl she and I both knew a hundred years ago in the Louis, and we’ll feel like quick and natural friends while across the yard, in the sawmill, a dog will start barking and keep barking and he won’t stop for anything.”

But I should stop. The Paris Wife is a great summer read. It’s narrated by Ernest Hemingway’s dowdy and square first wife Hadley, a woman who goes to Paris with her brooding alcoholic squire and is instantly forced into the “wife’s corner” at all those famous Gertrude Stein salons where literature’s most famous people drank absinthe and hacked through the beginnings of modernism and cheated on each other with each other. It’s shamelessly romantic and sensory and gossipy. And if it gets a little precious at times (actually, it’s precious most of the time, with phrases like “bourbon and soap, tobacco and damp cotton,” “sharp and lovely” heaped onto one another like in descriptions at a second-rate Etsy store) it’s fine.

The last 75 pages or so of this book revolve around Hemingway taking a mistress, Pauline (who was Hadley’s friend first–naturally) and Hadley dwindling into this sad-sack, numb lady who lets the two of them walk all over her. It’s pretty depressing, particularly when Pauline goes on vacation with the two of them and acts like Hadley’s best friend while getting a secret knock and a sex hour every day at 2 PM. It’s really depressing when Pauline slips into bed with them and Hadley writes “I knew what was happening, and I also didn’t want to come awake enough to feel it. The bed was sand, the sheets were sand. I was still in the dream.”

GIRL. Get out of there. Leave your man, smack that hooker and take your child (“Bumby”) to a nice daycare or something. Which she does, eventually, much to this reader’s relief.