Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down

By Rosecrans Baldwin | Jul 02, 2012

A self-described Francophile from when he was little, Rosecrans Baldwin always dreamed of living in Paris -- drinking le café, eating les croissants, walking in les jardins -- so when an opportunity presented itself to work for an advertising agency in Paris, he couldn't turn it down. Despite the fact that he had no experience in advertising. And despite the fact that he barely spoke French. After an unimaginable amount of red tape and bureaucracy, Rosecrans and his wife packed up their Brooklyn apartment and left the Big Apple for the City of Light. But when they arrived, things were not exactly what Rosecrans remembered from a family vacation when he was nine years old.

Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down is a nimble comic account of observing the French capital from the inside out. It is an exploration of the Paris of Sarkozy, text-message romances, smoking bans, and a McDonald's beneath the Louvre -- the story of an American who arrives loving Paris all out of proportion, but finds life there to be completely unlike what he expected. Over eighteen months, Rosecrans must rely on his dogged American optimism to get him through some very unromantic situations -- at work (writing booklets on how to breast-feed, raise, and nurture children), at home (trying to finish writing his first novel in an apartment surrounded on all sides by construction workers), and at every confusing French dinner party in between. An offbeat update to the expat canon, Paris, I Love You is a book about a young man finding his preconceptions replaced by the oddities of a vigorous, nervy city -- which is just what he needs to fall in love with Paris for the second time.

About the Author:

Rosecrans Baldwin: Rosecrans Baldwin is the author of a memoir, Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, May 2012), and a novel, You Lost Me There (NPR's Best Books of 2010, TIME and Entertainment Weekly Best Books Summer 2010, New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice). His essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Slate, Salon, and on NPR's All Things Considered, among other publications. He recently wrote "Our French Connection" about two weeks spent visiting American towns called Paris, now available as a Kindle e-book. In 1999, Rosecrans co-founded the online magazine The Morning News, where he is an editor. He and his wife live on the rural fringe of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. He currently teaches in the writing program at Duke University's Center for Documentary Studies.