By mid-afternoon, after hours of crafting and deleting sentences at the computer, my brain is stale and flat as yesterday’s club soda. Even my characters, struggling through the dramas of 1936 in Paris, are begging for a break. Time for a walk in nature. My Yosemite, my Niagra Falls, my Amazon River, is Central Park. […]
In 1989, I moved to Paris. I didn’t yet know the city, and in my imagination, it was the magical, mysterious black-and-white place portrayed by such great masters of photography as Brassai, Kertesz, and Cartier-Bresson. I quickly needed a furnished apartment to rent for 6 months, but was discouraged to find only dreary flats crammed […]
In 1936, to get to Europe from the US, you had to sail. It took a bit less than a week, and crossing the tempestuous Atlantic was not for the faint of heart. Gladys’s diary publishers included a helpful guide to life on board ship, remedies for the dreaded seasickness, and advice on hat pools, in […]
Novel of a wardrobe: A chic Parisienne from the Belle Epoque through the Thirties Musée Carnavalet, Paris 17 october 2013 – 16 March 2014 Fabulous fashions to dream about, relating the story of a woman of exquisite taste — and the means to indulge it. Daughter of a dressmaker, she was one of the first saleswomen […]
The facts are tantalizingly few. When in 2010 a 91-year-old woman died in the south of France, her estate was found to include a Paris apartment, situated somewhere between Pigalle and the Opera. The woman, Madame de Florian, had abandoned it in 1942, and for nearly 70 years, the forgotten apartment lay in darkness and […]