Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris

Edmund White was forty-three years old when he moved to Paris in 1983. He spoke no French and knew just two people in the entire city, but soon discovered the anxieties and pleasures of mastering a new culture. When he left, fifteen yeas later, to return to the US, he was fluent enough to broadcast on French radio and TV, and as a journalist had made the acquaintance of everyone from Yves Saint Laurent to Catherine Deneuve to Michael Foucault.