This entry was posted on 8/27/2007 9:24 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
So who hasn't dreamed about meeting some dreamboat in Paris?
But what happens after the romance and the late night cafe trysts and
the kisses atop the Eiffel Tower? That's the question that
Laura Florand explores in her true story "
Blame it on Paris", where a Georgia peach tries to learn to love escargots and her beloved Sebastien tries to adapt to the Deep South.
Here's our interview with Ms. Florand:
1) How did you get the idea for your book?
It generated itself. I was living this absolutely crazy, fun,
rich story, and I had always written (usually fiction), so one day I
saw a travel anthology was looking for travel stories on wine, and I
decided to write a travel essay about one little bit of what was going
on. Then the same publisher had another anthology, on Provence,
and I had a funny story about that. And then I realized that I
didn’t have just little bits of funny stories here and there, but that
everything that had happened from the moment I first spotted that
handsome Parisian waiter was a wonderfully funny and romantic true
story that could really reach people.
2) What are you working on right now?
I just finished LA VIE EN ROSES, a novel set around Grasse, the
centuries-old perfume capital of France. An American woman named
Jolie finds herself with a house and part of one of the last great
French rose fields on her hands. She falls in love with it, but
she also finds that her ownership of it is being disputed by the great
rose-producing Legrand clan. And the eldest son and heir in
that clan is quite cute, in his difficult way…
It’s a pure take-off on one of my favorite fairy tales, from her
family, whose fortunes reversed in the tech crash, to her father’s gift
to her of this house and rose field in order to get out of trouble, to
the sibling rivalry with her two sisters. I wanted to call it
PRETTY AND THE BEAST, which is still quite my most favoritest title of
all time, but everyone else just looked at me funny when I suggested
it. I have that trouble with titles.
3) What is something about you that would surprise your readers?
I lived in Tahiti for a while and studied Tahitian dance under one of
the grandes dames of dance, Louise Kimitete. Back in the
U.S., I formed and led an authentic Polynesian dance group (NOT one of
those fake-y Hollywood ones), and we performed in all kinds of places,
some high-end and some hilarious. The group still exists,
but I stopped leading it about six months ago, in pure
exhaustion. My daughter was six months old at the time, and I was
trying to handle that and the writing career, with my first book out
and another one in the works. And I still teach full-time at
Duke, so…it was a lot to juggle.
