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Kiss Me Again, Paris: A Memoir
Winner of a 2016 WNBA Award, juried by Deirdre Bair.
From Paris's famous opera house to its gossip-rich salons, KISS ME AGAIN, PARIS celebrates youth at the end of the 1970s, when women were in fashion and every woman, gay or straight, fell in love with women.
Author Renate Stendhal ekes out a living as a cultural journalist in Europe's most cultured city. She walks Paris at night dressed as a boy, has friends and lovers among artists and writers, and falls under the spell of the mercurial actress Claude, who has all of Paris talking. At the same time, she finds herself in the crosshairs of an alluring stranger who seems to appear everywhere and nowhere at once. There are mysteries with and without clues. Is sexual obsession a way to avoid the risk of love?
Filled with sensuality, style, romance, and suspense, Stendhal plays with the concept of memoir as a genre and transports the reader to another time and place. No matter what age you are, you'll be young and in love again when you reach the last page.
Includes 130 vintage photographs.
From Paris's famous opera house to its gossip-rich salons, KISS ME AGAIN, PARIS celebrates youth at the end of the 1970s, when women were in fashion and every woman, gay or straight, fell in love with women.
Author Renate Stendhal ekes out a living as a cultural journalist in Europe's most cultured city. She walks Paris at night dressed as a boy, has friends and lovers among artists and writers, and falls under the spell of the mercurial actress Claude, who has all of Paris talking. At the same time, she finds herself in the crosshairs of an alluring stranger who seems to appear everywhere and nowhere at once. There are mysteries with and without clues. Is sexual obsession a way to avoid the risk of love?
Filled with sensuality, style, romance, and suspense, Stendhal plays with the concept of memoir as a genre and transports the reader to another time and place. No matter what age you are, you'll be young and in love again when you reach the last page.
Includes 130 vintage photographs.
364 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 17, 2017
12 people are currently reading
152 people want to read
About the author
Renate Stendhal
15 books19 followersDuring her school years in Berlin and Hamburg, Renate Stendhal pursued studies of music, singing, painting, and dancing. She majored in literature at Hamburg University, then moved to Paris in 1966 to focus on classical dance. After an engagement at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, she returned to Paris in 1970 and joined an experimental theater group. From 1975 to 1982, she worked in Paris as a cultural correspondent for German radio and press (Frankfurter Rundschau et al.) – an occupation she picked up again in 2005, writing cultural reviews for the international magazine Scene4. In Paris, she also worked for many years as a personal assistant for surrealist painter Meret Oppenheim.
With the beginning of the French and German feminist movements, Renate Stendhal became an activist and co-created (with Danish painter Maj Skadegaard) the first feminist multimedia show in Europe, “In the Beginning . . . of the End: A Voyage of Women Becoming” (1980). A year later, the show was recorded on film by Studio D of the National Film Board of Canada and shown at women's festivals and international film festivals. While touring with the film across Europe from 1980 to 1983, Renate Stendhal started giving workshops and lectures on women's creative and erotic empowerment. Her essays and articles appeared in major feminist magazines including Feministische Studien and EMMA.
During the eighties, she became the first German translator of feminist authors Susan Griffin, Audre Lord, Adrienne Rich, and others. In 1984, she accompanied Audre Lorde as a translator on a reading tour of Germany and Switzerland. She translated Gertrude Stein's only mystery novel, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, into German keine keiner and in 1989 created a photo-biography with parallel visual and textual readings of Stein's life, Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. The English edition (Algonquin Books, 1994) earned a Lambda Award. In 2009, the photo-biography was republished and served as an inspiration for the exhibition "Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, Summer 2011", at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco and The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Renate Stendhal was involved in the educational programming surrounding the show and the parallel exhibition "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde", at SFMOMA. Her blog, quotinggertrudestein, followed the preparations, the "Summer of Stein" and the aftermath of the epochal exhibitions.
Since her move to California in 1986, she earned an MA in clinical psychology and a Ph.D. in spiritual psychology, but chose not to pursue a license as a therapist. Instead, she chose a spiritual path, getting ordained as a minister by AIWP, the Association for the Integration of the Whole Person, practicing a different kind of listening and intuitive, common sense conversation. In 2005, she became a provost at the University of Integrative Learning), guiding students through MA and Ph.D. programs that reward students for their lifelong learning. In 2010-2011, she became a certified hCG practitioner in the Dr. Simeons weight-loss protocol based on hCG amino acids.
In the States, Renate Stendhal published Sex and Other Sacred Games (Times Books, 1989), co-authored with her life companion, author Kim Chernin, with whom she also co-authored the portrait of a young opera singer, Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song (HarperCollins, 1997). She wrote and illustrated a novel for young adults, The Grasshopper's Secret: A Magical Tale (EdgeWork Books, 2002), and continued her reflections on women and eros with True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships (North Atlantic Books, 2003), originally published as Love's Learning Place: Truth as Aphrodisiac in Women's Long-Term Relationships(EdgeWork Books, 2002). Her most recent collaboration with Kim Chernin is Lesbian Marriage: A Love & Sex Forever Kit (Lesbian Love Forever, 2014) a quick reference guide and
With the beginning of the French and German feminist movements, Renate Stendhal became an activist and co-created (with Danish painter Maj Skadegaard) the first feminist multimedia show in Europe, “In the Beginning . . . of the End: A Voyage of Women Becoming” (1980). A year later, the show was recorded on film by Studio D of the National Film Board of Canada and shown at women's festivals and international film festivals. While touring with the film across Europe from 1980 to 1983, Renate Stendhal started giving workshops and lectures on women's creative and erotic empowerment. Her essays and articles appeared in major feminist magazines including Feministische Studien and EMMA.
During the eighties, she became the first German translator of feminist authors Susan Griffin, Audre Lord, Adrienne Rich, and others. In 1984, she accompanied Audre Lorde as a translator on a reading tour of Germany and Switzerland. She translated Gertrude Stein's only mystery novel, Blood on the Dining-Room Floor, into German keine keiner and in 1989 created a photo-biography with parallel visual and textual readings of Stein's life, Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures. The English edition (Algonquin Books, 1994) earned a Lambda Award. In 2009, the photo-biography was republished and served as an inspiration for the exhibition "Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories, Summer 2011", at the Contemporary Jewish Museum of San Francisco and The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Renate Stendhal was involved in the educational programming surrounding the show and the parallel exhibition "The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde", at SFMOMA. Her blog, quotinggertrudestein, followed the preparations, the "Summer of Stein" and the aftermath of the epochal exhibitions.
Since her move to California in 1986, she earned an MA in clinical psychology and a Ph.D. in spiritual psychology, but chose not to pursue a license as a therapist. Instead, she chose a spiritual path, getting ordained as a minister by AIWP, the Association for the Integration of the Whole Person, practicing a different kind of listening and intuitive, common sense conversation. In 2005, she became a provost at the University of Integrative Learning), guiding students through MA and Ph.D. programs that reward students for their lifelong learning. In 2010-2011, she became a certified hCG practitioner in the Dr. Simeons weight-loss protocol based on hCG amino acids.
In the States, Renate Stendhal published Sex and Other Sacred Games (Times Books, 1989), co-authored with her life companion, author Kim Chernin, with whom she also co-authored the portrait of a young opera singer, Cecilia Bartoli: The Passion of Song (HarperCollins, 1997). She wrote and illustrated a novel for young adults, The Grasshopper's Secret: A Magical Tale (EdgeWork Books, 2002), and continued her reflections on women and eros with True Secrets of Lesbian Desire: Keeping Sex Alive in Long-Term Relationships (North Atlantic Books, 2003), originally published as Love's Learning Place: Truth as Aphrodisiac in Women's Long-Term Relationships(EdgeWork Books, 2002). Her most recent collaboration with Kim Chernin is Lesbian Marriage: A Love & Sex Forever Kit (Lesbian Love Forever, 2014) a quick reference guide and
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
December 15, 2017
Kiss Me Again, Paris is a walk down the dark alleys you always wanted to explore. Stendahl serves up a banquet of the machinations and inner lives of artists in a city that loves and reveres its creatives, a city that while high minded always seems to make room for the struggling.
Stendahl shows us what it feels like to reinvent not simply one's career, but ones identity, nationality, shifting loyalties. With her, we explore a sexuality that, at turns, supports, taunts, inspires, intrigues and beleaguers.
As a risk taking dancer and an art critic, Stendahl's exploration of her own creative process and of the egos, motivations and manipulations of the artists around her gives us a view of Paris few have seen.
With beautiful and inspired prose, we follow her down those dark alleys, into those bedrooms, art openings, wild parties, bars and cafes to not just 'see' but to feel what it was to live an artist's life in the city of our imagination and dreams. It's not all roses but it's deep! Bravo! to this already known and brilliant author!
Stendahl shows us what it feels like to reinvent not simply one's career, but ones identity, nationality, shifting loyalties. With her, we explore a sexuality that, at turns, supports, taunts, inspires, intrigues and beleaguers.
As a risk taking dancer and an art critic, Stendahl's exploration of her own creative process and of the egos, motivations and manipulations of the artists around her gives us a view of Paris few have seen.
With beautiful and inspired prose, we follow her down those dark alleys, into those bedrooms, art openings, wild parties, bars and cafes to not just 'see' but to feel what it was to live an artist's life in the city of our imagination and dreams. It's not all roses but it's deep! Bravo! to this already known and brilliant author!
June 17, 2017
WOW. You NEED to pick up this memoir. It's chock-full of photographs from the author's collection which takes you right to the heart of the tale. Very few books capture my attention in such a way as to read them 3 or 4 times, but it's easy to see WHY this memoir does that- the author has an incredible way of making you feel you are living and breathing in that same space she is. In that same opera house, in that same cafe, in PARIS, as she narrates. This book makes you feel cultured and you learn about theories and people and sexuality in a way you had never imagined before. Truly an incredible read.
August 4, 2019
This book goes to the top of my favourite book stack. Never to be displaced I suspect. It recreates, in an almost mystical way, the atmosphere and mores of the 70’s for free minded women in the premier city of romance. Stendhal links her arm in yours, whispers in your ear, and carries you with her back to the heady and hedonistic days of burgeoning female sexual empowerment in the city of love. She shares her heart and her body with you. It is so sensuously charged that reading it in public feels like an invasion of your personal space. This is a book I clutched to my chest periodically as I read. It possessed me. I don’t want to spread the word. I am jealous of sharing it. I will read it many times.
June 28, 2019
Wow!Wow! Wow! This book was a true eye opener for me in just being able to peek inside someone's life and feel so luxurious and immersed inside Paris. I've visited once and this was like going right back. It brought back so many memories of being there but more than a tourist: made me feel like a local. The pictures were incredible & I thank the author for sharing them since they had a raw and exposed emotional aspect.
June 28, 2019
Renate is a true storyteller. There's something about how she describes everything that takes you along with her and she lets you in on the secret. Along with the photographs to give you a deeper look into her world, the overall reflection and sensation is that while Paris is so iconic, you never stop learning and wanting to simply know more. About the author and the city alike.
June 10, 2019
I loved Kiss Me Again, Paris, where all of Paris seems to be female, available and in love. At one point the author says, “I detected half a dozen ex-lovers in the room”–-it’s the 1970’s after all. Renate Stendhal has ditched her young husband, overbearing parents and post-war Germany, to reinvent herself as a bohemian who never looks back, while diving into affairs, heartbreak, feminist polemic, and the rich cultural nightlife of the time. This book is delicious, and check out the beautiful vintage photos that give her story a film-like presence in the imagination.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews