Move to France, Then Write About It: Ex-Pat Fact and Fiction

Aug 11, 2011
Vivien Young

Fortified Town in the Pyrenees - Vivien Young

Living the dream - moving to France for the good life has been a fashionable trend in recent years. Writing about the experience has become equally popular.

You could say that it all began with A Year in Provence Peter Mayle's 1989 memoir of his first twelve months living in the South of France. The Mayle book won the "Travel Writer of the Year" in the British Book Awards in 1989 and Peter Mayle was named "Author of the Year" in 1992.

A Year in Provence was made into a film series starring John Thaw; Encore Provence and numerous other French cuisine and French culture books followed; in 2002, the French government made Peter Mayle a Chevalier de la Legion d'honneur for "cooperation et francophonie Etranger en France … 43 ans d'activites professionnelles et culturelles" – a hard act to follow, you might say.

Other Writers, Other Parts of France

Peter Mayle may have set a high standard, but the success of his book merely seemed to encourage others. It seemed that if you were a Brit who'd moved to France, the experience wasn't complete unless you also wrote about it.

Susie Kelly, for example, moved from the UK to Poitou Charente to escape the fall-out of the recession of the 1990s and produced two books, Best Foot Forward and Two Steps Backward, about her adventures in France. These included a lone hike from La Rochelle to Lake Geneva, so give a somewhat different perspective on France than can be found in most travelogues.

Then, there's French Leave, the book by the chef John Burton Race, who packed up a wife, five daughters and a son to spend a year in Montferrand, rediscovering his passion for cooking with the best of fresh regional ingredients. This book also includes a number of excellent recipes, as one might hope for but not necessarily expect.

Celia Brayfield is a well-known British writer who moved to the foothills of the Pyrenees (the north end, in Basque country) for a year and wrote about it in Deep France, an entertaining memoir which also engages with the debate of national identity and the struggle to find a place to be where one feels one truly belongs.

A Little Fictional Antidote

Daisy Waugh's Bordeaux Housewives offers a dry, fictional slant on British cultural refugees to la belle France, using the freedom of fiction to point out some of the down sides of being an emigre. The British stiff upper lip doesn't permit moaning and longing for Marmite and British cups of tea in autobiographical memoirs!

The memoirs listed above are just a small selection of the vast library of books about France written by people who've moved across the Channel from Britain, all evidently trying to emulate the success of Peter Mayle.

Now that British emigrants in search of a property bargain are being forced further afield by rising French property prices and an unsympathetic exchange rate, who knows what the next "home thoughts from abroad" best seller will be!