Paris Lost and Found: A Memoir of Love

by Scott Dominic Carpenter

What to do when life smacks you down? Head for Paris, of course!

In this book, the author of French Like Moi (2020) returns to the scene of the crime with more tales of intrigue. This time, he’s reeling from loss—and hoping the City of Light will come to his rescue.

From bizarre encounters on the Metro to comical clashes with authority figures, including a quixotic battle against a flock of migrant parrots, and even the tribulations of dating, Paris Lost and Found unveils sides of the great city that are as quirky as they are authentic. With a unique blend of wit, insight, and wistfulness, Carpenter charts a path through a labyrinth of challenges—only to emerge on the other side, squinting into the bright light of hope and new beginnings.

Genres: Memoir, Travel, France, Nonfiction, Paris

272 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 2024

About the author

Minnesota-born and Midwest-bred, Scott Dominic Carpenter is the author of Theory of Remainders: A Novel (named to Kirkus Reviews’ “Best Books of 2013”), This Jealous Earth: Stories, French Like Moi (2020) and its sequel Paris Lost and Found, coming out 9/24. Winner of a Mark Twain House Royal Nonesuch Prize (2018) and recipient of a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, he has published in a wide variety of venues, including The Rumpus, Silk Road, Catapult, and South Dakota Review. His work has also appeared in various anthologies.

When not tearing his hair out over life in France, Carpenter teaches French literature and creative writing at Carleton College (MN).

His website is at www.sdcarpenter.com.

Reviews

[Chazzi]

I received this book through Library Thing Early Reviewers.

Married life is changing for Scott Dominic Carpenter. His wife has been diagnosed with dementia and it is taking her away.

Scott had been introduced to Paris at age 10 by a trip with his family. The memories stayed with him, along with his souvenirs in the shoe box. These he later shared with his newlywed wife. Their visits and time spent working in France, led them to by an apartment in the thirteenth arrondissement in Paris, to live in while they collected more souvenirs (memories). Now he is watching as these souvenirs dissolve from his wife’s world.

Scott writes of the changes, but not in a maudlin way. Rather he finds he is looking at Paris with a new view that incorporates humour and wit that tempers his wistfulness of the changes. This perspective helps his walk down his life’s paths. Dealing with the changes that start coming faster as his wife leaves, dealing with the restrictions of the pandemic and after his wife dies.

I read this in a leisurely pace so I could absorb the mood of the moments and enjoy his wit. The quirky people and events made good subjects for his observations and kept this memoir memorable reading.

[Phyllis]

Thanks to LibraryThing & Traveler’s Tales for an advance reader's copy. All comments and opinions are my own.

I’d read and enjoyed Carpenter’s earlier book, French Like Moi: A Midwesterner in Paris in 2020 so was looking forward to this one. It was a humorous and bittersweet memoir about loss and starting over, set in Paris, Carpenter’s alternate home city.

While the story begins with his wife’s decline due to dementia, Carpenter’s writing is entertaining and self-deprecating in a witty style that had me turning the pages. Several laugh-out-loud anecdotes as well as some tearful observations made this a special book – personal, poignant, and authentic.

[Karen J.]

When I was in an MFA program, I remember being told that if you have a good beginning and a good ending, readers will forgive the middle. In this case, the beginning doesn't build any tension or motivation to keep reason. The middle is full of cliched humor, and often attempts at humor that aren't funny, at least to me. To call this book a "Memoir of Love" is a stretch. I only finished it because a friend read it and enjoyed. After the first couple of chapters, I wanted to see why she liked it. I never did find out.
The last chapter is okay, however, and has some humor that actually works. I do not recommend this book.
I can't believe all the prizes the author has won.

[Lin Salisbury]

Paris is known as the City of Light, but for Scott Dominic Carpenter, who splits his time between St. Paul and Paris, it also became the City of Loss. Carpenter’s first memoir FRENCH LIKE MOI, introduced readers to a different Paris – the day-to-day life of an expat living in the not so cool part of town making faux pas at every turn and turning them into comedic sausage.

In his new memoir, PARIS LOST & FOUND, he wrestles with tragedy, as his wife Anne succumbs to Alzheimer’s Disease. Carpenter begins his tale in the Dordogne Valley, with a flashback to the time he was recruited to accompany a tour group in exchange for several evening lectures about life in France. During the daytime, he and Anne travelled with the group of three dozen other Americans as they were dragged through what seemed to be a very stylized tour of the country’s most iconic tourist traps: wine and cheese tastings, chocolate tastings, and a two-hour folkloric dance performed by locals. When Carpenter had an opportunity out of earshot of the others, he asked one of the dancers how often they performed. As he sucks on a cigarette, the Frenchman intoned, blowing smoke from his nostrils, that they only did that shit for tourists. Carpenter felt “like a kid in Disneyland who bumps into Mickey Mouse on a cigarette break, the mouse head pulled off.” Something was amiss in Paris. He bemoaned the fact that the tourists were not experiencing the real Paris but a facsimile of it – until they returned to the hotel and discovered that there had been a real-live heist – the wall safes ripped from the rooms and wallets, jewelry, and passports stolen. After the day’s tiresome tour, Carpenter relished the drama and Anne remarked that she’d never forget the experience. Except, she did.

As Anne’s disease progressed, they returned to America just as the country and the rest of the world was shutting down because of the pandemic.

After Anne’s death, Carpenter returns to Paris, still struggling with grief and learning how to operate in the world as a single person. With some encouragement from friends, Carpenter eventually decides to reengage with the twenty-first century’s version for meeting new people – the dating app. For Carpenter, Paris had come full circle – from the City of Light, to the City of Loss, to the City of Love.

Carpenter brings his midwestern sensibility and deprecating sense of humor into every story in PARIS LOST & FOUND, whether sleuthing the source of a human turd found in the garbage carrell in his condo building or negotiating the complications of the French banking system – we’re rooting him on, because by the end of the memoir, he’s our guy, fumbling his way into a new life in Paris, the City of Love.

This is Lin Salisbury with Superior Reviews. Listen to my conversation with Scott Carpenter on October 24 at 7pm and the 26th at 6am on Superior Reads.

[Stephen Heiner]

While this book was very much about Paris, I primarily think about it as a book about losing a beloved spouse in a painful way. Carpenter's wife dies of dementia, and as she does, their shared and wonderful life in Paris begins to fragment for Carpenter as well, and he shares that fragmentation with us.

Carpenter still retains his characteristic joy and humor which we saw in his first book, but this story necessarily has to constrain that joy behind more sober ruminations.

(quoting Sylvain Tesson) "France is a paradise inhabited by people who believe they're in hell."

"Like everyone else in Paris, I'm always on the lookout for that most elusive of unicorns: stemware that screams elegance while whispering affordability." (p. 55)

"You're supposed to be able to put whatever you want on your wish list, but when I was five or six, my most ardent desire was to be seven or eight." (p. 64)

"The first months come with a thousand small epiphanies, and they stick with you forever ± at least with one of you, at least for as long as forever means, which is to say, as long as the past remains visible on the chalkboard of memory, mere ghostlike traces after the first wipe of the erasers of time and illness, before they are gone for good." (p. 113)

"In France they love movies like this, the ones where you have no idea what's going on." (p. 120)

"Stopping in the bar for a beer, I sat at my table and closed my eyes, taking in the hum of voices, a long medley of half-heard, quarter-understood words and phrases. I know, I know...how about over there...not all the same...and he took the curve really fast...thanks...here you go...haven't seen her since...at the end of my rope...just a second...okay, I'll call you... Every phrase sparked a story." (p. 205)

[Heidi]

This book was a big disappointment. It promised to tell something funny & poignant about being a caregiver to a wife with dementia, but was entirely too light and superficial to cause me to care about Anne or the author. Anything warm, charming or heartfelt was left out in favor of pointless anecdotes about turds, big & small. I have no idea why Scott Dominic Carpenter devoted one of his longer chapters to postulations about what came out of someone's posterior. Maybe that would make sense if there was a point to the narrative...you know, building background for something important that comes later in the book...but no, I never found any reason for his prattle about poop. What happens later is a recurrence in the Wildlife chapter with rat turds...again for no apparent point.

The only thing I appreciated about this memoir was its structure of three distinct parts: The End, The Middle, The Beginning. This is the setup for a classic transition story, with an ending, a period of confusion, and a new beginning. There was potential, but I just didn't connect with Carpenter...whereas I expected to get to know and care about him and his wife, he instead spent his chapters observing strangers carrying gangly lamps onto the subway. I continued to read to find what I was missing, but it never turned up.

My advice to the author: If you don't want to reveal yourself, don't write a memoir!

[Olivia Thompson]

A delightfully unpolished love letter to Paris, and the emotional potholes we stumble into along the way.

Scott Dominic Carpenter has done it again. Paris Lost and Found isn’t just a travel memoir, it’s a humorous, heartfelt excavation of grief, reinvention, and the absurdities of French bureaucracy. With his signature wit and a dash of self-deprecating charm, Carpenter meanders through Parisian mishaps—from feathered standoffs with rogue parrots to fumbling attempts at dating and dodging existential crisis on the Metro.

What I love most is how he writes Paris not as a fantasy but as a city of real chaos, kindness, and contradiction. It’s all here: the beauty, the bafflement, the heartbreak, and the hope. And somehow, amid all the detours and disappointments, you finish the book feeling lighter.

If French Like Moi made you laugh, Paris Lost and Found will make you laugh harder, and maybe tear up a little too.

Highly recommend for anyone who’s ever thought of running away to Paris… or just running away, full stop.

[Jim Nyland]

Humor may be the best medicine, but even a pooping vandal in their building can’t lock in the memories of his wife, lost to alzheimer's for long. Unexpectedly, Carpenter finds himself alone in Paris reeling from the pandemic.

Bruised but unbeaten, Paris comes roaring back to life. From bizarre encounters on the Metro to funny clashes with authority figures, and an "Out-of-left-field" battle against a flock of parrots, This book unveils sides of the great city that are as quirky as they are genuine. With a blend of wit, insight, and snark, Carpenter charts a path through his new labyrinth of solitude—only to emerge on the other side, hopeful for the promise of a new beginning. All in All, I can only muster a 3 star rating. A lot came together, rather conveniently - I started reading the physical book and switched to audio to avoid the DNF. It was quirky enough to keep me tuned in.

[Jeanette Michalets]

This is an entertaining memoir about the author's life in Paris, a place he calls home a good part of each year. What makes the years he covers in this book different is his wife's battle with Alzheimer Disease, which, sadly, no one has won as yet. When she can no longer recognize their apartment or neighborhood in the city she always loved, things reach an all-time low.

As sad as this is, the book is still filled with humor (sometimes laugh-out-loud humor) as the author, a teacher of French and English on the college level, rebuilds his life. There are anecdotes about the strange goings-on in his own building and in his neighborhood, with "side trips" into the whole Covid experience.

[Amanda]

Am I writing this a little teary-eyed? Yes. I was lucky enough to receive a galley of Paris Lost & Found. I loved Carpenter’s previous book about life in Paris, French Like Moi. This book is similar in some ways; a chapter about being locked out of his bank account had me in PTSD flashbacks about paying electricity bills in Greece. However this book is largely about aging, losing a partner, and trying to find the familiar when everything is off-kilter. There’s so much love and humor woven through this book. I recommend it highly.

[Alex]

Overall, I thought this was a really engaging read that gave a Midwesterner’s perspective on life in France. If you like travel memoirs that detail culture and are full of humor, life, and love then this book could be for you. Find my full review here: https://likelystory.blog/2024/06/02/r...

[Heidi]

Heartfelt and humorous. It’s a story about life in Paris (and in America), but it’s really more about one man grappling with life and loss, love and friendship. I liked this book better than his earlier book “French Like Moi,” though I think I understood this book better having read that one first. And I still want to visit Paris, though probably not live there!

[Takuya Amagai]

Definitely helped that I went to Paris this year, but maybe the book would have been more enjoyable if I stayed there longer to get a grasp about some of the French concepts, locations, and details that are listed in the book. Still a good read even if you didn’t go to Paris since concepts like loss, and the changes that happened after COVID are things most people can relate to.

[Mark Moxley-Knapp]

Perhaps best if you've been to Paris, but it tells stories and touches on themes that apply to many people. And you can certainly learn a lot about Paris, and France, from reading it.

Well written and edited. Lovingly crafted sentences, evocative and touching. And sometimes funny.

[Debbie Williams]

I enjoyed Scott Carpenter's keen and often funny observations about both his adopted home of Paris and his native Minnesota as well as his poignant sharing of his wife's dementia and how it changed their lives.

[Kathryn Rouse]

Funny and sweet. Author’s wife develops dementia and dies. He moves on.

[Thomas Maple]

Having lost loved ones to dementia, I really appreciated Scott's focus on recovery with honesty and humor woven in.

[Lisa]

Nonfiction memoir from the author, who splits his time between Paris and Minnesota, revealing the true nature of living in Paris, and not just the romantic tourist view.

[Carla]

Very different approach to memoir about grieving….well done and no less powerful for this approach.

[Polski Urban]

It is hard to rate a memoir, because what gives us the right to judge someone else’s story.

[Arthur]

Paris and the pandemic were interesting. I felt sorry for him and his wife. The rest of his musings didn't connect with me.

[Caren]

Loved it from the first page. Great writing and easy to meander through! Compelling and insightful. Now I want to read his other books!

[Erin Austin]

A delight! I appreciate when someone knows about and is up front about the shadow side of Paris (my most favorite world capital), yet can still sell the beauty of its people and culture so well. It’s not hard to love Paris, but the way the author sticks to the “regular”—not the showy, touristy, postcardy parts—is largely why I loved this book.

Also, as an additional point, I was tickled pink that the author used the words “fecally” (a new adverb???) on page 181 and “excremental” (a new adjective???) one page later. I both laughed and found it brilliant.