Want to be transported to Paris without the heat or the crowds? The Paris Novel is just the book. One needs two hands to count the number of memoirs penned by Ruth Reichl but her latest book is a work of fiction inspired by her editor and the many exquisite meals she sat down to in the '80s. It's a perfect summer romp that's equal parts chance and fate.
Evan Kleiman: I don't think I ever read a book of yours as quickly as this one. It was just the enjoyment and loveliness I needed.
Ruth Reichl: This book is really an ode to pleasure, to the power of pleasure, 100%.
So this book is dedicated to Susan Kamil, your editor. What encouragement did she give you to write it?
She said when I handed in my last book, Save Me the Plums, "I love that chapter about the little black dress, and I just wish you had bought it." I had the story. It's about when we were doing the first Gourmet Paris issue, I had been going to this wonderful vintage clothing store, Didier Ludot. I've been going there since I was 16, but I'd never tried anything on, because it's like a museum of gorgeous clothing. I was afraid to touch anything. But now I'm the editor of Gourmet magazine, and I go in and the proprietress says, "I have your dress!" I put the dress on, and I am utterly transformed. I mean, I am a creature I have never imagined. I am gorgeous, sexy, you know. I look like an opera star. I couldn't believe that that could be me and that a dress could do that, and I desperately wanted it.
Then I ask how much it is and it's $6,000 and I can't buy the dress. Susan said, "But I wanted you to buy that dress so much. What if you imagined a character who buys the dress and imagines how her life changes?" The minute she said it, I could see the book. And the thing that just breaks my heart is that a few months after she said this, Susan, very unexpectedly and very tragically, passed away, so she will never read the book, and I wrote it totally for her. But I felt like she was sitting on my shoulder the whole time I was writing it.
Introduce us to Stella, the young woman who is at the heart of The Paris Novel.
I wanted the pleasure of writing a character who had never really enjoyed life in any way. Stella is this woman who has had this very traumatic childhood, and her response to it is to shut down completely. She lives this tiny, little life. It's the only way she feels safe. She's a copy editor. Copy editors, as you know, are detailed people. She has never allowed herself to enjoy food, or she's never had friends because they're not safe. She has lived this life of complete routine, and her mother, whom she does not get along with very well, dies very unexpectedly and leaves her a legacy and a letter that says, "Use this money to go to Paris."
It's not a huge amount of money, it's $8,000 but Stella doesn't want to do it. She doesn't like to travel, she doesn't want to leave New York, she doesn't want to leave her job, but she kind of finds that, once her mother is gone, that she's lived her whole life kind of in opposition to her mother. With her mother not being there, she kind of falls apart, and her boss says, "Go to Paris." So she very reluctantly goes to Paris and is there for a month and lives her life exactly as she had in New York. She makes herself a strict schedule. Every day she goes to a no good restaurant. She goes dutifully to every museum, every monument, and she has absolutely no fun.
Then she finds the dress. This initial scene between the dress shop owner and Stella grabs you and pulls you into the story. What is Stella's response to being told that this dress has been waiting for her and she must try it on.
She thinks, "What a sales pitch." She thinks exactly what I myself thought when the sales lady said, "Your dress has been waiting for you." I thought, "Oh, she says that to everyone who walks in the door." She's very dismissive of it — until she puts the dress on.
There are three things about this dress, and one is that, as it comes over her head, the person who had worn the dress, who it had belonged to smelled like apricots and vanilla. So she's immediately enfolded in this incredible aroma. She sees a label which has a name on it, "Severin," and the sales lady says that this dress, which was the first one that Saint Laurent designed for Dior, was so special that it was given the name of every person who bought it. Then she turns around and looks in the mirror and has that experience that I do, which was, "Oh, my God, who would think that a dress could do this for you? Who could think that a dress could transform you completely?"
She desperately wants to be that person in the mirror, and she does the only impulsive thing she has ever done in her entire life, because the sales lady says to her, "Take this dress, put it on, wear it. Do exactly what I tell you to do, and tomorrow, if you have not had the most wonderful day, bring it back, and I'll give you all your money back. And the first thing is to go to Les Deux Magots."
Now begins her adventure. She ends up meeting an older man who kind of sees in her something that in his own way, he needs someone to share the way he views his life and how he views his Paris. Tell us a little bit about him.
I fell in love with this character so much.
Did you know somebody like him? Did you experience someone like him?
Well, I had seen someone who looked like him in a restaurant so I had a model for him. And I have to say, the writer Grace Paley said, "All my characters are themselves, except for every old man who is my father." I feel a little bit like that, that Jules is very much like who my father was. I mean, my father was not wealthy and he was not an art collector, but he was a very old school European. He didn't come to America until he was 26 and he was very kind, knew a lot about art and literature, loved beauty, and I wasn't aware of it when I was writing it, but later it occurred to me, "Oh, my God. I mean, Jules is like a very idealized version of my father."
So he takes Stella in hand and basically tutors her in art and in food. What is the first restaurant that he takes her to?
The restaurant is L'Ami Louis, and it is like every meal in this book, a meal that I myself ate in Paris in the '80s. I was a freelance writer, I was a restaurant critic but I was living in a commune in Berkeley in the '70s, when I first started writing restaurant reviews. Although I was a restaurant critic, I had never been to a three-star restaurant because I couldn't afford it. I mean, I have no money.
In 1984, I came to LA as the restaurant critic. In 1984, the LA Times was known as the velvet coffin and when I said to my new boss, "What is the limit of my expense account?" He said, "We will let you know when you go over it." And they never did. I thought, "I'm going to go to Paris and eat in all those restaurants that a restaurant critic should have eaten in." So, my first thing at the LA Times is I go to Paris, and for the first time in my life, it is not a Paris of eating bread and cheese in the park, but a Paris of going to great restaurants.
So I did go to L'Ami Louis and L'Esperance. So all of this, the meals are meals that I myself was experiencing for the first time in the '80s, but I get to experience them through Stella's eyes. And Stella is someone, I've been a restaurant critic, Stella has never had good food before. She suddenly understands that this is another way of understanding the world, of being in the world, and that she has closed herself off to something that is not just pleasure but joy.
"The Paris Novel" follows the escapades of Stella St. Vincent, as her typically reticent life begins to unfold in the City of Lights. Photo courtesy of Penguin Random House.