Diane Johnson is the author of Le Divorce, (1997), a novel which focuses on a pretty American woman, navigating French society, and the cultural drama that entails. James Ivory did the movie, which starred Kate Hudson, in 2003. Johnson has a home in Paris, and her intimate knowledge of a culture so different from her native rural Illinois, provides for sparkling books. They have been called satire; I am not sure that is the right word. Well-observed might be a better description of her stories. She co-wrote the screenplay for The Shining, (1980), and her book, Perisan Nights, (1988) was shortlisted for a Pulitzer.
Of her many books, we quote briefly from Johnson's non-fiction book about Paris, Into A Paris Quartier: Reine Margot's Chapel & Other Haunts of St.-Germain (2007). There we find a description of a street scene which includes "an antic crowd of musicians....the little old woman who does Piaf imitations very badly almost every night.... [and] an organ grinder...with his family of docile or drugged cats."
And Diane Johnson has written book reviews for the New York Review of Books since the 1980s. One review, on the theme of jealousy, combines her recent take on Peter Toohey's history of Jealousy (2014) and Valérie Trierweiler's Thank You for This Moment: A Story of Love, Power, and Betrayal (2014).
We excerpt:
Love makes the world go round, says the poet, while the cynic says it’s money; and Peter Toohey, professor of classics at the University of Calgary, constructs an entertaining argument for jealousy being the wellspring of a much greater part of our emotional lives, and of a larger proportion of literature, law, and daily existence, than we may have thought. Elsewhere, Professor Toohey has also worked up boredom and melancholy; in those books as in this brisk survey, he proposes some benefits of emotions usually considered to be negative: jealousy is “a potent means for the assertion of individual rights and the encouragement of cooperation and equitable treatment.”....He details some of the more famous, gruesome modern murder cases, but Othello and Medea are the archetypes. “Anger is cruel and fury overwhelming, but who can stand before jealousy?” (Proverbs 27:4).....Darwin believed jealousy to be an innate survival mechanism—each individual seeks preferment and is probably hard-wired to do so, like kittens in a litter nudging their fellows away from the nipple.
Or - like the French first lady insisting, out loud, the President of France kiss her "on the mouth" while they were on live television, and in front of his previous mistress. But perhaps you have standards, and are not up on continental gossip. Let me quote Johnson's review of the now discarded first lady's memoir.
Valérie Trierweiler’s memoir, Thank You for This Moment, is... an account of her brief reign as President François Hollande’s première dame....First lady is a role that has much turbulent recent history in France, beginning with the last president Nicolas Sarkozy’s previous (actually second) wife Cécilia, the one who dumped him in office, gaining a lot of fans in America when she blew off a lunch with the George W. Bushes, pleading a headache, and turned up later shopping. She divorced Sarkozy after being première dame for four months and twenty-nine days.
Hollande, the current president, as was well known, had fathered the four children of his long-time companion, another professional politician, Ségolène Royal. They had split up before her failed presidential run in 2007, [but stayed together publicly during Royal's campaign] and when he was elected in 2012, his new mistress Valérie Trierweiler was installed as his official mate, with much discussion about how she should be referred to, protocol issues that were especially troubling to some Americans because Hollande was planning a White House visit, and a leader bringing an unmarried first lady presented a seating problem at the official dinner. Hollande preempted the problem by coming stag, with a public announcement right before the trip that he was dumping Valérie: “I’m making it known that I have ended the life in common which I shared with Valérie Trierweiler,” which was, some said, the first Valérie learned of it. ....
In her vengeful but rueful memoir, Trierweiler .....[reveals she] could not bear the idea of Hollande’s past relation with Royal or Royal’s moral upper hand as mother of his children, and she doesn’t bother to dissemble her socially disapproved, uncool emotion: “I will readily admit to it: I am jealous. I have been jealous with every man I have loved. I do not know how not to be when I am in love.” Even before her reign, she had raged at pictures of Hollande and Royal together: “I will admit I did want the difference to be clear. There had been a woman before, with whom he had four children, and there was another one now….” When she’s the one officially “with” Hollande, she’s determined to force Royal to acknowledge her. She corners her rival and, with a nod to photographers, obliges her to take the proffered hand. “I know it was childish of me, but it gave me satisfaction.”
She had sunk her own fortunes and turned French opinion against her right off the bat by ungenerously tweeting her support for Royal’s opponent in a regional election: “My tweet had tainted the supreme symbol: the mother, the blameless one.” Even worse, on election night, seeing him go out of his way to greet Royal, Valérie lost her composure and couldn’t resist a triumphalizing whispered demand that she herself receive a kiss “on the mouth,” not realizing the world was able to read her lips on the giant screen. She’s even jealous on Michelle Obama’s behalf when the pretty blond Danish prime minister takes a selfie with Barack: “I could not stand seeing other women put their heads on [François’s] shoulder and hold him by the waist…. I have even sent a few of them packing. Would these women have liked me to cosy up to their husbands?” She can relate to Michelle’s apparently glum expression in the photograph [at Mandela's funeral] : “I was delighted to see I was not the only jealous partner.”
In the words of Diane Johnson, "it isn’t clear she really assimilated..[the] lesson of the ruin her jealousy of his former partner brought down on her own head..." Is Johnson's summary midwestern smirking or French sagacity?
In her vengeful but rueful memoir, Trierweiler .....[reveals she] could not bear the idea of Hollande’s past relation with Royal or Royal’s moral upper hand as mother of his children, and she doesn’t bother to dissemble her socially disapproved, uncool emotion: “I will readily admit to it: I am jealous. I have been jealous with every man I have loved. I do not know how not to be when I am in love.” Even before her reign, she had raged at pictures of Hollande and Royal together: “I will admit I did want the difference to be clear. There had been a woman before, with whom he had four children, and there was another one now….” When she’s the one officially “with” Hollande, she’s determined to force Royal to acknowledge her. She corners her rival and, with a nod to photographers, obliges her to take the proffered hand. “I know it was childish of me, but it gave me satisfaction.”
She had sunk her own fortunes and turned French opinion against her right off the bat by ungenerously tweeting her support for Royal’s opponent in a regional election: “My tweet had tainted the supreme symbol: the mother, the blameless one.” Even worse, on election night, seeing him go out of his way to greet Royal, Valérie lost her composure and couldn’t resist a triumphalizing whispered demand that she herself receive a kiss “on the mouth,” not realizing the world was able to read her lips on the giant screen. She’s even jealous on Michelle Obama’s behalf when the pretty blond Danish prime minister takes a selfie with Barack: “I could not stand seeing other women put their heads on [François’s] shoulder and hold him by the waist…. I have even sent a few of them packing. Would these women have liked me to cosy up to their husbands?” She can relate to Michelle’s apparently glum expression in the photograph [at Mandela's funeral] : “I was delighted to see I was not the only jealous partner.”
In the words of Diane Johnson, "it isn’t clear she really assimilated..[the] lesson of the ruin her jealousy of his former partner brought down on her own head..." Is Johnson's summary midwestern smirking or French sagacity?
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