LIVING IN FRANCE

Peter Mayle Wrote About Life in Provence, Drank Wine, Sold Books & Inspired Thousands Of Followers

So how does my life in France compare with his?

First the similarities. Mayle wrote about quirky neighbors, exotic meats stuffed with truffles, drinking copious amounts of red wine, dealing with brain-numbing French bureaucracy, and a neighbor’s frustrated donkey.

Et Moi?

I have quirky neighbors; my first conversation with one of them took place while he was tapping an upstairs window with a long stick on which he’d taped a stuffed monkey eating a banana. Another one plays karaoke day and night and, even after the walls of my apartment were soundproofed, I can still hear his music. And some village garçons decided to go fishing . . . in my goldfish pond.

I’ve also eaten truffles and drank gallons of red wine (not all in one evening) and have a Carte Gris, a Carte Vitale, and a Carte de Sejour which has given me more than enough experience with French bureaucracy, thank you very much.

And don’t get me started on the moans and groans and braying of a couple of apparently sex-crazed donkeys who live across the road.

Like Mayle, I love France. I moved here nearly nine years and still think it was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made . . . a few links, if you’d like to read more.

So back to Mayle and his account of the French experience and how it differs from my own.

Mayle was a successful London advertising executive when he decided he’d had enough of the rat race and, with his fourth wife, moved to Provence where they bought an old farmhouse and spent a lot of time, and presumably money, fixing it up.

After my mother died, a few months after her 100th birthday, I moved to France alone, rented an apartment I could afford but didn’t like, then found a two-bedroom apartment I both liked and could afford. I still live there.

Mayle was excited about his French adventure; curious, engaged, eager to learn more about his newly adopted country.

Me too.

But Mayle had money and I don’t which makes a bit of a difference.

So while he and his wife lived in ritzy Provence in their house of honey-colored stone with a cherry orchard in the back, I’m in neighboring Languedoc, otherwise known as Poor Man’s Provence. Other than fields of lavender, Languedoc has everything Provence has — sunshine, Mediterranean beaches, quaint villages, etc., but it’s less expensive.

Which for me is all-important.

While Mayle appeared to have few, if any money problems, I struggle financially. I’ve lived on lentils, scraped black mold from carrots, and belong to a Facebook group called Surviving France on a Budget which has more than five thousand members who swap recipes and share money-saving tips.

OK, I don’t want to bang too long on the poverty drum. If I’d handled my finances more responsibly at fifty, I might be living in Provence now — although I am perfectly happy where I am.

I do eat out once in a while, usually, lunch because it’s less expensive than dinner. Still, Mayle’s lip-smacking, gastronomic descriptions of lobster mousse and hand-picked cheeses, which I doubt were washed down with a pichet of table wine, conjure up a very different kind of dining than anything I’ve experienced.

But Mayle’s book, published in 1989 when French real estate was more of a bargain, even in Provence, than it is today, continues to inspire thousands from less sunny climes to move to France, buy some charmingly dilapidated dwelling, and use what seems to be their unlimited financial resources to transform it into the perfect blend of bucolic charm and modern convenience.

“Yes we’ve preserved all those maahvelous old doors, just look at that intricate detail, such exquisite craftsmanship back then, but, haha, we had to put in an icemaker and a dishwasher so the entire kitchen had to be replumbed and . . .well, modernized. But from the outside, you wouldn’t know it from any other village house, would you?”

Right. So after spending probably the equivalent of five years of my annual income on installing a swimming pool in the adjacent meadow, putting in an outdoor kitchen, with another icemaker, natch, they end up only living in the place for part of the year.

“It’s just a second home, you know.”

And then like Mayle, they write memoirs.

I’ve picked up a few. Skimmed through the trials and tribulations of transforming the once uninhabitable barn, tumbledown windmill, horse barn whatever, and wondered if anyone ever as any issues with money. Is renting ever an option? Oh please. Only while they search for a suitable ruin to take apart and reassemble.

No one gets turned down for a loan, money flows, probably from the elaborate robinet de cuisine in the kitchen, and then it’s off for a night out — at a Michelin starred restaurant of course.

Although marriages might get a little frayed, what with all the construction dust and unreliable French workman, described in great detail in the memoir, all is forgiven and there are drinks on the terrace as the sun sets on yet another day in paradise.

Bah humbug.

Enough of the Mayle imitators, I want to write a different kind of memoir about living in France. One involving a sprightly older woman who can only afford to rent, who doesn’t have a husband to assure her that everything will be fine, and sometimes lies about her age although she tries to kick the habit.

So now for a bit of shameful boasting.

A friend of a friend put me in touch with . . . drum beat please Christopher Little, the agent who discovered and once represented J.K. Rowling.

To my great surprise, Little asked for a synopsis and, to my even greater surprise, for a couple of chapters. Although he ultimately passed on my book — fortunately, because I was still very much in the middle, early middle, of writing it, he wrote:

“You are an accomplished writer with an easy conversational narrative voice. The prologue quickly draws us in, and we know we are meeting a passionate, attractive, intelligent, but vulnerable woman of a certain age who is about to take us on an adventure. a lot of books written on this subject, but your situation is different, you are not part of a couple doing up a property, or man of 50 something starting a vineyard, or a mum with a young family. You are different, you are a vital woman in her late sixties who did something that most women of a similar age would not have the nerve to do, it’s inspiring!”

I should frame the letter, except I’ve read it so many times, I almost know the words by heart.

Earlier this year, I was in a bit of a writing slump, but, thanks to Medium, I’ve started polishing and posting some of the chapters, and eventually, I’ll compile them and see what happens.

Who knows, maybe it’s time for a different, less affluent, version of the French experience.

Viva la locataire!

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