Footsteps: In Love with a Frenchman

by Susan M. Tiberghien

In this collection of witty and heartfelt essays, Susan Tiberghien takes us on a journey of a marriage grounded in two cultures. Susan is American. Pierre-Yves is French. Together, while living in five different European countries, they raise six children, not to mention balancing family life in three different languages. There is beauty, loneliness, cultural richness, and cuisines described in such vivid details, you’ll believe you are an invited guest at the dining room table. Footsteps: In Love with a Frenchman also brings the writer’s journey to life. Before she began publishing essays in THE INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE, THE FINANCIAL TIMES, THE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, among other publications, Susan Tiberghien started out as a young American bride living in Provence. A French housewife in the 1950s, Susan scribbled notes here and there, but was too busy with her family to pursue writing seriously. She was fifty before she attended her first writing workshop. Her first book, Looking for Gold: A Year in Jungian Analysis, was published when she was sixty to great acclaim. Her most recent book, Side by Side: Writing Your Love Story, was published in 2015. She is now eighty and still writing, teaching, and publishing. “It’s never too late to start writing,” is advice she gives at every writers’ conference. “Footsteps is about a journey on foot through life; it is also a book about the faith that informs and sustains that journey, even if it never mentions a deity—the faith of people yearning to contribute something good to the world and finding ways to do so….It is also about the places we live in, great and small, and about the echoes in a home emptied of its human footsteps when the children are gone on their future and the mother faces an undefined future she never contemplated before.” –Thomas E. Kennedy, The Copenhagen Quartet

191 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 11, 2015

About the author

After marrying a Frenchman, following him around Europe with a growing family, I started to write more or less full time at the age of 50 when we settled down in Geneva, Switzerland. I published my first book, Looking for Gold: A Year in Jungian Analysis, at the age of 60.

I continued to publish, two more memoirs and numerous narrative essays in journals and anthologies. Then the widely read One Year to a Writing Life, and spring 2015, Side by Side: Writing your Love Story and Footsteps: In Love with a Frenchman.

I have been teaching writing for over 20 years, here in Geneva where I direct the Geneva Writers' Group (an association of writers, with presently over 230 members), around Europe, and in the States for the International Women's Writing Guild, at Writers Centers, and at CG Jung Societies.

I feel extremely fortunate at the age of 80 to still be in love with the same Frenchman, to enjoy visits from our six children and spouses and sixteen grandkids...and to write and teach and read and dream.

Reviews

[Marina Sofia · Rating 5 out of 5]

There is a home-made (but carefully crafted) quality to this patchwork quilt of a life filled with laughter, tears, children's voices and recipes. The writing is poetic, warm, witty and full of subtlety. The chapter on the potato is a masterpiece of humour and comment on cultural differences.
I was left wishing for a family like that, despite all of the difficulties that the author only hints at. The love, mutual respect and openness to what life offers are evident on every page.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Heartfelt memoir of a family's story. Made me wish I'd had six children instead of just three.

[Carol Masciola · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is very heartfelt memoir of a young woman who goes to France to study in the 1950s and ends up marrying a fellow student. She writes about adapting to the language, the customs, her husband's very big French family, of creating another big family with him, including an adopted child from Vietnam, and living in Italy, Belgium, France and Switzerland. The whole big sweep of a person's life, from college to becoming a grandmother. It also contains recipes, each with a story.

[Carolyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting memoir of life in different countries pointing up the subtle differences in cultures.