I moved to Paris when I was twelve years old. I came from an English suburb of Montreal which had been built a couple of years before I was born. The main street had a train station, a supermarket and a pharmacy. There was a restaurant of sorts: in the rear of the convenience store was a counter with eight revolving stools. It served hamburgers and fries. It didn't go further than that, but that was all anyone expected.

Then I moved to Paris and life suddenly became spectacularly full. There were one or two things they didn't have, like corn, either on or off the cob, and peanut butter, but I think it's fair to say that what they did have more than made up for that. I ate in restaurants often, and every meal was a discovery. I simply had no idea that food could be so delicious. There's a movie where Meryl Streep plays Julia Child: her reaction to the food in Paris was exactly mine. It was impossible that anything could taste so good.

And, of course, there was everything else as well: the widest streets you've ever seen, as well as the narrowest; the uniformity of the architecture, and all (or almost all) uniformly beautiful; in most streets, traffic chaos; in the large parks, real serenity. That's why I took Asia (Asia McPhee, the main character in the novel) and put her in Paris. I wanted to make at least part of her life happy.