Breathless
An American Girl in Paris
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- 5,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
In the early 1960s, most middle-class American women in their twenties had their lives laid out for them: marriage, children, and life in the suburbs. Most, but not all. Breathless is the story of a girl who represents those who rebelled against conventional expectations.
Paris was a magnet for those eager to resist domesticity, and like many young women of the decade, Nancy K. Miller was enamored of everything French—from perfume and Hermès scarves to the writing of Simone de Beauvoir and the New Wave films of Jeanne Moreau. After graduating from Barnard College in 1961, Miller set out for a year in Paris, with a plan to take classes at the Sorbonne and live out a great romantic life inspired by the movies. After a string of sexual misadventures, she gave up her short-lived freedom and married an American expatriate who promised her a lifetime of three-star meals and five-star hotels. But her husband wasn't who he said he was, and she eventually had to leave Paris and her dreams behind.
This stunning memoir chronicles a young woman’s coming-of-age tale, and offers a glimpse into the intimate lives of girls before feminism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a graceful, aching memoir of her ing nue years in Paris, comparative literature professor and author Miller (What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past) re-creates a time of fledgling sexual liberation and rueful homecoming. Breaking away from home with her intellectual, Jewish parents in Manhattan, where she had felt "conned" to live during her college years at Barnard, Miller blissfully took off for study at the Sorbonne in fall of 1961, resolved to be the Jean Seberg character in Jean-Luc Godard's Breathless and be adventurous and independent. In that pre-feminist era, she quickly learned that sleeping with men was effortless but achieving sexual satisfaction was not. In her naivety, as her time in Paris lengthened and she won a Fulbright teaching fellowship, she often confused sex with finding the right "dream-companion" la Simone de Beauvoir, and was frequently disappointed, from falling for the leather-clad beatnik on the motorcycle, Leo; the earnest Tunisian student Bernard, who wanted to marry her; and the overbearing Irishman Jim Donovan, the head of a self-run language school, who hired her and married her. In her sweetly ironical, fondly forgiving look back at her youth, it actually took an affair with a humble German carpenter named Hans to help Miller escape her "nice-Jewish-girl destiny" and find her way home again.
