What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind

by Debra Ollivier

Overview

The Los Angeles Times bestseller! "A Gallic prescription for living a life that is richer, more sensual, messier, and a lot more fun" (Boston Globe)

It's not the shoes, the scarves, or the lipstick that gives French women their allure. It's this: French women don't give a damn. They don't expect men to understand them. They don't care about being liked or being like everyone else. They accept the passage of time, celebrate the immediacy of pleasure, embrace ambiguity and imperfection, and prefer having a life to making a living.

In What French Women Know, Debra Ollivier goes beyond stale ooh- la-la stereotypes, challenging ingrained notions about sex, love, marriage, motherhood, and everything in between. With savvy, provocative thinking from French mistresses and maidens alike, Ollivier presents a refreshing counterpoint to the tired love dogma of our times, and offers realistic, liberating alternatives from the land that knows how to love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780425236482
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	09/07/2010
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Debra Ollivier is the bestselling author of What French Women Know and Entre Nous. She was raised in Los Angeles and attended UCLA and the Sorbonne where she received degrees in French literature. Her writing has appeared in several publications including The Guardian, Le Monde, and Harper’s Magazine. Ollivier spent more than 10 years in Paris before returning to California.

Editorial Reviews

American-born Francophile Ollivier follows up Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl with a volume largely concerned with uncovering the behavior and lifestyle of the secretive French woman. For instance, Ollivier pointedly debunks the myth that French women deprive themselves of fattening foods and drink in order to maintain a suitable weight, but reveals that French women are masters of portion control. She also recounts instances with her French counterparts-she lived there for 10 years, has a French husband, and divides her time between L.A. and Paris-in which she came to the realization that, in France, women genuinely love men, and vice versa; both strive for more compatibility between the sexes, radically diminishing the "battle of the sexes" mentality so commonplace in American society. Intriguingly, Ollivier contrasts the French desire for mystery against the American need for knowledge and control, finding in the discrepancy a possible reason for the ever-escalating American divorce rate. Ollivier is sure to dazzle any reader with a fondness for French women with this batch of anecdotes and corresponding hypotheses, drizzled with a winning combination of sarcasm and wit.
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Publishers Weekly

Ollivier compares stereotypes of American women (whom she does not appear to care for or respect) with stereotypes of French women, with emphasis on how each relates to and interacts with men. She liberally relies on quotes from French writers, intellectuals, and philosophers in her description of French women but looks primarily to Hollywood movies and television, as well as other aspects of pop culture, to describe American women. As narrator, she gives an adequate reading but would be well served by varying her pace and using pauses judiciously as she falls into a singsong cadence at times. A snippet of a stereotypical French music is used to separate chapters but seems contrary to the serious intent of Ollivier’s cultural observations. J.E.M. © AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2009 - AudioFile