In the mid-1990s, Australian journalist Sarah Turnbull met a French
attorney named Frédéric in Bucharest and followed him
back to Paris, where they lived together and eventually married.
End of a familiar story, right? Wrong. Turnbull, a born reporter,
has given her book an apt subtitle: not "Life and a New Love in
Paris," but "Love and a New Life in Paris." For, as Turnbull
accurately observes, in her case it's the love that brings her to a
new life and not vice versa.

Turnbull provides brief glimpses into how love grew between her and
"Fred," including descriptions of a huge mirror from which he
patiently scraped paint with his thumbnail; for the most part he
remains an opaque figure. There is no doubt whatsoever that this
idiosyncratic pair are in genuine swing-from-the-gilt mirror love
--- after all, she does move to another country for him and he
makes enormous and touching attempts to introduce her to his family
and his culture --- but Turnbull seems to have made a conscious
decision to draw a veil over their love life, both emotional and
physical. Her intention is not to describe a romance but to detail
her own transformations --- from single woman to spouse, and from
Aussie to "almost French."

The "almost" modifying "French" includes a large amount of
agonizing awkwardness. The near-universal tourist experience of
Parisian rudeness is magnified hundreds of times for someone like
Turnbull who chooses to stay on past the usual week or two. "A week
might not be long enough," muses the author after her first dinner
in Fred's apartment, but she still maintains enough natural
savoir-faire to take a breather and travel for several
months. After that however, "I return to Paris. The way I see it,
there is really no alternative … if I don't go to France, I
might regret it forever."

What makes Turnbull's recounting of her Parisian existence
eminently readable is that there is so much she might regret by
actually staying. She freely admits that when she returned to Paris
and Fred's apartment, she had no friends or family, little language
ability, and few job prospects. Her initial setbacks (stacks of
rejection letters from editors, dinner party embarrassments, and
difficulty in communicating with her new love) lead Turnbull to
feeling "confused, guilty even, that I should feel unhappy in a
place that looks like paradise."

Being unhappy away from familiar things is an age-old theme for
females who follow their hearts to new lands --- but while the
theme is ancient, Turnbull isn't. She is a thoroughly modern woman
whose frustrations spur her on to find solutions. Before long she
has entered a prestigious journalism program, encouraged Fred to
buy a new apartment in the Montorgueil district, and actually
learned to tolerate the suffocatingly hidebound atmosphere of
Fred's provincial family seat at Baincthun.

Unlike Adam Gopnik's PARIS TO THE MOON, in which author, wife and
child are all expatriates who will return home at some point
(however reluctantly), ALMOST FRENCH is a book that clearly
presages a sequel (perhaps WHOLLY FRENCH) --- or does it? One of
the freshest things about Turnbull's great adventure is that, while
she wholeheartedly throws herself into loving and living in a
different country, she never abandons the self she created for the
nearly thirty years before coming to France.

In the last chapter, after their marriage, Turnbull reflects
on the adventure that is just beginning. While it is clear that
Sarah and Fred have many adventures to come, it is equally clear
that she may never be completely French. Vive la
différence!