Crazy run-around this one gives you. Although I could’ve done without the many chapters of art history, plot and characters were good enough to keep me interested. Very unique and well-done thriller/farce novel that I’ll have to find similar ones!

“I was a six-foot-two-inch, thirty-six-year-old, rather loud and unserious Californian. The sight of France in my porthole was like a giant question mark.” Love how this book is about a woman finding herself and her passion later in life.

“My father was pained by his daughters’ liberal leanings. He had assumed I would marry a Republican banker and settle in Pasadena to live a conventional life. But if I’d done that I’d probably have turned into an alcoholic, as a number of my friends had. Instead, I had married Paul Child, a painter, photographer, poet, and mid-level diplomat who had taken me to live in dirty, dreaded France. I couldn’t have been happier!” God the way Paul & Julia loved each other is so enviable!

“It seemed like we’d never really been anywhere or done anything and the whole point of the trip was for Philapop to get back to Pasadena and say, ‘I’ve just been through France and Italy.’ In fact, I didn’t like traveling first-class at all… none of it seemed foreign enough to me. It was all so pleasantly bland that it felt as if I were back on the SS America.” This is how I feel about travel - cool to experience a first-class thing maybe once in a blue moon, but I come to a foreign country to be exposed to foreign things, not the Marriott hotel in different fonts.

“Paul was alternately vexed by his advancing years, and buoyed by his theory that ‘old age is a state of mind and a function of mass hypnosis rather than an absolute’.” I’ll take this advice from a guy who lived a very long & cool life.

“The lamplit city glittered in its puddles, and Notre Dame loomed out of the mist, giving our nerves a twinge. When you know your time in a place is running out, you try to fix such moments in your minds eye.” This is what makes traveling so special. Everything is just so new and cool because we look at it with a fresh perspective we’ve never had at home.

“And the great lesson embedded in the book is that no one is born a great cook, one learns by doing. This is my invariable advice to people: learn how to cook - try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!” Brb buying her cookbooks now