Monsieur Mediocre: One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French

A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ.

John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her time spent there as a student. But fifteen years in - after falling for a French actress he met in New York and moving to Paris - he's finally ready to admit that his mother's version of the city is mostly a fantasy.

In this relentlessly funny and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris. Full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France, but it's a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.