Bastille Day By Joanna Biggar When J.J., the narrator of That Paris Year, departed after finishing her exams, she left in June, too early to catch the extravaganza that is le quatorze juillet in Paris. But she knew about the legendary festivities she had missed in her adopted city: fireworks, parades, the laying of wreaths for the heroic dead—, with “le grand Charles” de Gaulle himself saluting from a grandstand. J.J. already had her own, American-flavored July 4th sensibility, as she remembered lighting sparklers and pinwheels while eating home-made peach ice cream in … [Read more...]

Fact or Fiction By Joanna Biggar As a fiction writer, it is not uncommon to be asked: “Is that real, or did you make it up?”  This was certainly true for my first novel, That Paris Year, based on my own experiences as a young woman attending the Sorbonne in the 1960s. It was assumed that the narrator, whose name, J.J., includes the same initials as my name, are one and the same person. And if that is true, the thinking goes, everything else in the book must be “real,” too. One French reader even wanted to know how my French grandmother was getting along and was shocked to learn that I … [Read more...]