TGIF With Vanina Marsot, Author of Foreign Tongue

Photo by David Wagreich

I absolutely loved Foreign Tongue by Vanina Marsot. So, when I opened my email a couple of weeks ago and saw a message from her, it made my day! In the midst of her returning to the United States from Paris, Vanina graciously agreed to answer a few of my questions. She even provided these lovely pictures of Paris.

I hope you enjoy the following Q&A as much as I did! TGIF everyone!

Literate Housewife: Vanina, I loved your novel! Thank you so much for taking the time to email me and answer my questions. This makes my day! Just like Anna, you’ve lived in both LA and Paris. What are your favorite spots in both cities? Are they places that tourists would know about or are they spots where natives go to avoid them?

Vanina Marsot: There are so many places I love in both cities. Even the touristy ones have their appeal, but here are some of my favorites.
In LA, I love the beach, from Venice to Malibu, though I’m usually wearing sunblock and a hat and long sleeves. I like the rare places in LA where you can walk: on Abbot Kinney in Venice, parts of Santa Monica, and tiny Larchmont Village. I love food adventures, such as taking four freeways over to Artesia for Indian puffy bread and curry at Woodlands, then desserts at India‘s Sweets and Spices. I like Thai Town in Hollywood and Little Tokyo downtown. I like the private room karaoke bars in Koreatown (of which there are lamentably few in Paris) and Chosun Galbi for Korean BBQ, and I like the Mexican markets where I buy jamaica, red hibiscus tea. I like the photography exhibits at the Getty Center and the view on a clear day. I like James’ Beach’s hamburger and I like Skylight books in Los Feliz and Fred 62′s tuna melt, something I have never been able to find in Paris. I like the drive out to Palm Springs, especially in the early evening, with the sunset in your rear-view mirror. I love road trips and planning the soundtrack for them. LA requires some work, because you really do have to drive a lot, but it can be very rewarding.
In Paris, I love walking and biking around, and the city is so beautiful that sometimes merely getting from one place to another is its own reward, an opportunity to discover a neighborhood and look at the architecture. Some of the tourist spots are wonderful: I never get tired of the stained glass windows at la Sainte Chappelle, and I love the Eiffel Tower, especially at night when it sparkles every hour on the hour. I like hot chocolate at Angelina as does every tourist who’s ever been there, but that doesn’t stop it from feeling very Parisian. I like the meandering streets of Montmartre and neighborhood shopping streets: up high on the rue de Belleville, up by the Place des Fêtes, there’s a boulangerie, a cheese store, lots of small little shops and a couple of cafes by the church. As you go up the street, you pass the stone plaque commemorating the steps where Edith Piaf’s mother gave birth to her. I like the lesser-known parks all over the city, particularly the view from the terraced Parc de Belleville and from the folly at the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. I like the Vietnamese restaurants in Belleville, the revival movie houses of the 5th, and the comfy chairs at the Max Linder cinema. I love lounging in the green enamel metal chairs by the fountains in the Tuileries and the Palais-Royal. I like walking by the river, by the canals, but also strolling around the boutiques and cafes of St. Germain. I like the vintage shops and art galleries in the Marais, the open markets all over town, and stumbling across tiny merceries, where you find buttons and ribbons and lace. I found the most adorable candy store in the 5th, everything in large glass jars and made à l’ancienne, the old-fashioned way. Paris is the best city in the world to get lost in, because there’s always something to see and because it’s so small that you can’t really get that lost in it.

LH: What is your favorite childhood memory from each home?

VM: Good question! My favorite memory about Paris is feeding the ducks at the small lake in the Bois de Boulogne with my grandmother and my sister. My grandmother would keep stale baguette bread in a bag, and when we had enough, we’d walk over to the small lake and feed the ducks. In my memory, it’s always cold and somewhat misty, the water an eau de nil green, the ducks all beautiful, noisy, iridescent mallards, and the one white swan utterly beautiful and a tiny bit forlorn.
In Los Angeles, it’s got to be the entire Enchanted Summer, as I refer to it: I think I was 10 or 12, and my parents were given a huge pile of unused ticket books from friends who were leaving LA for a diplomatic posting far away. Back then, admission at Disneyland was inexpensive, but you shelled out for ticket books. My father was teaching summer school at a university near the park, so every Friday, we piled into the car, drove down the 405, dropped my dad off, and went off to Disneyland for a few hours, using up our ticket books until it was time to pick him up, right after the parade and fireworks. I know that place like the back of my hand. I don’t care how commercial it is–it was magic for me when I was a kid.

LH: What was it that inspired you to write Foreign Tongue? Was there anything that surprised you while you were writing it? What was the most difficult aspect for you?

VM: Growing up bilingual, I think I probably had some good material to start with, but the difference between languages has always been one of my favorite topics of conversation: the things you can say in one language that you can’t in another. I hoard those books about expressions that only exist in other languages, always marveling that, say, Japanese has a word for a certain kind of aesthetic or that German is endlessly creative in putting two or three words together to create a new one. I’ve never actually stopped learning French, because people are always using words I don’t know–slang, of course, which changes all the time and is a perpetual source of both mystery and delight, but also old-fashioned words that come back into use, or particularly specific words that I never learned in the first place. I’m always asking my French friends how those words are defined and used, and the French are always delighted to give you their take on what a word means, its connotations, even what it means about you when you use it. Those conversations are definitely part of the root of this book.
What surprised me the most about writing it has to be the serendipity of writing. You think you’re going down an improbable, odd path, and you second-guess yourself, but you write anyway, and then somehow, it works and it makes sense, and it’s like a gift, the unexpected twist that glimmers and comes into view. I used to get annoyed when a writer friend would say “my characters talk to me and I just write down what they say,” because it sounded, well, perhaps slightly ludicrous or precious, but as I wrote this book, I realized that if I let my imagination wander out of the safety zone, loosen the reins a bit on my intentions, sometimes that was enough to allow things to come together.
The most difficult aspect was maintaining the stamina to keep writing. I think writing a book teaches you how to write a book, but it’s a lot of work, especially if you write long, the way I do, and then you have to pare back and edit. When I say I write long, I mean really long–I think I spent a year and a half editing before I thought it was ready to start sending out.

LH: One of the things about Foreign Tongue that really pleasantly surprised me was that there wasn’t any indication that Anna preferred one place over the other. Oftentimes in similar novels and even memoirs there is a heavy anti-American sentiment. It was nice for me to explore Paris in your novel without having to apologize for being American. Was this a conscious decision you made when you wrote your novel?

VM: Yes, very much so. On the one hand, there’s been some anti-American sentiment, as you point out, and sometimes, in the US, some anti-French sentiment. Politics aside, I’ve actually talked to people who swear they’d never go to France because “people are snobby there.” I can see where some places might appeal more than others, but I am constantly astonished by the preconceived notions people can have about other cultures.
So, it seemed to me that an interesting point of view about the difference between cultures and languages would have to come from someone who knew and loved both of them; otherwise, the deck would be stacked. For instance, a lot of people don’t realize that the French are, in general, rather nice to foreigners–where they’re sometimes not so nice is to each other. This seemed like an interesting predicament to put a bilingual woman in.
There are also so many Americans in Paris, and there have been for so long (Henry James, Hemingway, etc., etc.), that Americans seem very much a part of the city–you see it in the English language bookstores, the Gap, American Apparel, even the breakfast and lunch diners that have sprung up around town, all the places that do brunch, the huge numbers of American movies that come out, almost always subtitled, not dubbed. In France, there’s often a real delight in these parts of American culture, and I find that touching.

LH: I really loved the quotes that you used at the beginning of each chapter. They were very appropriate, especially the one selected for the last chapter. Are they something you compiled afterwards? If not, how did fit into your writing process?

VM: I’m so glad you liked them! It’s a hobby of mine, collecting quotations. I’ve got boxes and boxes of them, all on index cards, organized by category. I love quotations. I get them from articles, from interviews, from movies, but also from books–I tend to dog ear pages, and when I’m done, I go back and copy the passages I like onto my index cards.
In my book, I liked the notion of a slightly mysterious, sometimes mischievous voice commenting on the chapters–after all, who picks those quotations? It could be Anna, my heroine, but it’s not clear. It could be the voice of her subconscious, or it could be the voice of a distant, omniscient narrator, a shadow lurking somewhere in the background. I liked the idea that they’d point to a couple of things going on at once, like a sly or whimsical joke, or an illustration of something, a comment on the proceedings, oblique clues.

LH:I really enjoyed Anna’s relationship with her employer Monsieur Laveau and with Bunny. They were both older men who had a profound impact on her. She needed them both to learn about herself. Where did those characters come from? Was it important to you as the author that Anna’s mentors were both male? Could a female have made such an impact on her?

VM: Anna is definitely trying to figure out a lot of stuff in her life, and one of her journeys involves figuring things out for herself instead of trying to locate their answers in other people. I wanted both Monsieur Laveau and Bunny to be father-like figures for her, people who could challenge her, and I liked that one of them was French and the other American. Bunny was partly based on an old, dear friend, and Monsieur Laveau was pure invention–what they have in common is that they both hold language in high regard, so that they are both able to challenge her translation work, and hence also her ideas about language and the book’s content. Because the book she’s translating is racy, it makes her uncomfortable, puts her in a bit of a bind, that the two people she talks about it with are men. I think there would have been less tension had either of them been women. But I think Anna gets a lot of insight from her women friends, Clara and Althea, and Lucy in London, so they supply a kind of counter-balance.

LH: Let’s chat about cuss words. I enjoy learning new ones from different languages, so learning those along with Anna’s translation was a lot of fun for me.

VM: Because you share my delight in cuss words, I thought I’d share some more with you. Years and years ago, when I taught English to French business executives, the only way to get them to get over their shyness in actually speaking in class was to teach them how to curse. So, I began every introductory class began with a sophisticated deconstruction of how to use f*ck in English. FYI, “motherf*cker” has no real equivalent in French, but the closest equivalent is “enculé,” (pronounced ohn-cu-lay) which in its verb form means “to bugger” and in its past participle form can be an adjective, meaning “a person who gets buggered.” It is therefore quite possibly the rudest thing you can say in French.
Other words that crack me up: “putain,” which means whore, but is used kind of like “shit,” and “bordel,” which literally means bordello, but which really means something like “what a f*cking mess.” The best part is when French people link them all together, in a Ricky Ricardo-like stream of invective: putain-de-merde-fais-chier-bordel.

LH: Thank you so much, Vanina! I enjoyed our chat and I love all of the pictures you sent! I couldn’t choose from among them, so I included them all. Best of luck with Foreign Tongue. As my readers know, I highly recommend it.