Ransacking Paris

Book excerpt: What does it mean to fulfil a dream long after it seems possible? When Patti Miller arrives to write in Paris for a year, the world glows 'as if the light that comes after the sun has set hadspilled gold on everything'. But wasn't that just romantic illusion? Miller grew up on Wiradjuri land in country Australia where her heart and soul belonged. What did she think she would find in Paris that she couldn't find at home? How could she belong in this city made of other people's stories? She turns to French writers, Montaigne, Rousseau, de Beauvoir and other memoirists, each one intent on knowing the self through gazing into the 'looking glass' of the great world. They accompany her as she wanders the streets of Paris - they even have coffee together - and talk about love, suffering, desire, motherhood, memory, the writing journey - and the joys and responsibilities of ransacking.. Exploring truth and illusion, self-knowledge and identity, and family and cultures, Miller evokes the beauty, the contradictions and the daily life of contemporary Paris. Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there, but then they make a honey which is entirely theirs -Michel De Montaigne