A Brief Parisian Autobiography in Three Parts (Part I)

Or, how a twenty-something writer might find themselves in Paris

Part I

“Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, which certainly does not mean what it says but betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced.”

James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

photo by Augusta Sagnelli

Picture yourself in a small studio apartment with bright overhead lighting. The living room is empty, save you and me. The host told us to come from seven-thirty onwards, and it’s almost nine-thirty, and her hair is still wet from a cold shower and now she’s preparing a cheese platter in the tiny Parisian kitchen, which is far too small for either of us to be of help.  

On the glass coffee table in front of us are two uncorked bottles of red wine and two bags of unopened Tyrell’s potato chips (both sea salt and apple cider vinegar).

“Looks like we have the same taste in snacks,” you break the ice by opening the first bottle and pouring two glasses. We sit down next to each other on the sofa, and I have to stretch out my lanky right leg at an angle so that my knee doesn’t bonk the glass table’s metallic edge.

“Cheers,” you say as we clink glasses, “So, tell me—what brought you to Paris?”

“My answer might disappoint you. It’s the same story as always.”

“So, you came here for love, too?”

I start at the beginning.

I was born in a small town called Ganges in the south of France, pulled out of my mother by cesarean five minutes after my twin brother. Our American mother and Spanish father had met in a theater commune in the south of France. It’s called the Roy Hart Theater Group and it exists to this day.

At two years old, our parents took us to the USA, where we were raised between our mother in Chapel Hill and our father in Durham, North Carolina. Our parents raised us independently and in an alternative household, but this is where I tell you, “That’s a long story for another time.”

My brother and I grew up in a liberal region of a conservative state. The middle-class suburbs that defined our youth could be navigated with razor scooters and bicycles. Our parents were both theater professors at the local university and, when we graduated high school, we had the opportunity to study out of state. Naturally, being twins, we insisted on going to different schools. And naturally, being twins, we both attended the same college in Vermont.

Photo by Augusta Sagnelli

During my junior year abroad in Paris, I explain, I met a woman in a bar near the Pantheon, down the hill from where Voltaire and Marie Curie are buried. She was a law student at the Sorbonne. We fell in love. One year later, I returned to Paris to be with her and write my first novel. I gloss over those two years in the same way I gloss over them in casual conversation:

“Three years later, the relationship ended and the novel was shit.”

“No, no,” you pour us a second glass of red. “You’re not getting off that easy. Explain.”

My first job in Paris was at the Hard Rock Café. I worked there for exactly eight hours, during which I learned how to squeeze mayonnaise and ketchup into little white pots. At the end of my shift, I went down to the employee locker room and realized a colleague had stolen my cell phone and wallet. Needless to say, I quit. Within a week, I found a job on Craiglist to teach English to unemployed French people at a small company in Paris. They paid far better than the average teaching gig and they hired me immediately. They said I’d be a perfect fit for a team of other twenty-somethings who’d also just waded onto the proverbial shores of Paris.

After a few weeks, I began to notice my bosses wearing necklaces, rings, and belt buckles with a strange symbol at its center, which looked like this:

I soon learned that my bosses were Raëlians, members of a UFO religious cult started by an amateur racecar driver, sci-fi fiction writer, and vaguely successful pop singer named Raël who told a prophecy about meeting a Martian that looked like Jesus inside an ancient French volcano. My colleagues and I thought it was funny at first, especially the Raëlians’ annual events called “Happiness Academies,” which, judging by the online videos (I found my topless boss in one of them), seemed to be about free love, New Age music orgies, and anti-capitalism (unless you’re tithing 10-15% of your salary so that one day you can build a space port for the Elohim, a majestic alien race that for some reason needs it to be built in Jerusalem.)

During that time of reliable income, I spent my teaching breaks at a café working on a bad novel about a disillusioned newscaster who starts to realize how fear and violence have taken control over American democracy. During my ten months working for the Raëlians’, I can’t say I learned many things, but I do remember my bosses suggesting I drink orange juice instead of coffee, and that I should meditate more, and do yoga, and in the peculiar language of the teaching curriculum we were taught to ask clients strange questions about whether or not aliens existed, and whether or if they believed in the “theory” of evolution.

After a few months, things got weird, which is usually what happens when you’re employed by a cult. I needed tax documents in order to get health insurance, and for some reason the company wouldn’t give them to me. After months waiting on them, the Big Boss, a man who wore a vanilla cream suit and had a mane of greying hair, asked me to come into his office to discuss my needs. His smile at the threshold turned into fury when he closed the door. He berated me for “poisoning the company waters” with my skepticism and he might’ve called me some names, but all I remember was telling him, “I just need health insurance, man.”

I got my papers and quit soon after and found another teaching gig for less than minimum wage. It was technically legal because even though I taught five hours a day and had to commute two to three hours between private offices, the job was considered part-time. My bosses were only interested in the bottom line, which became its own kind of cult in the end. I worked on my novel during my one-hour breaks, and when I finished the fifth draft, I realized just how bad it was.

The plot was decent but the prose was self-indulgent and meandering, and the protagonists seemed to be confused about what they wanted in life. I titled the sixth draft “Draft 6 of a Beaten Dog” and I haven’t looked at the manuscript since. Disillusioned with the novel, and unsure if I was cut out for the writing life at all, I did what any bookish twenty-something does with a loose sense of responsibility and applied to a master’s program in social theory to better understand why human beings to do what they do.

Part II:

A Brief Parisian Autobiography in Three Parts (Part II)