Emily in France 🇫🇷 I Heart NY
Zizmorcore.
Look, I ain't the trendiest of people. My younger sister has a sliding scale for judging my clothes that ranges from "terrible" to "fine." I mostly wear my hair in pigtails, because it is very easy to do and does not change much if I wear a hat and then take the hat off and then maybe lose the hat and steal a different hat my other sister has stolen from someone else. I buy the same shoes every year (one pair for winter, one for summer). But there is a current trend so appealing to me that I'm seriously considering buying a $39 t-shirt.
Zizmorcore.
I'm a born-and-bred New Yorker, a fact that, pre-Covid, I was obliged to share with strangers pretty regularly. Upon meeting the members of my tour groups, some version of the following conversation would always, always transpire.
"You're not from here."
"No, I'm from New York."
"Like, New York, New York?"
"Yes."
"The city?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
What they wanted, I soon realized, was an intersection. A cross-street. They wanted to situate me near the monuments they knew: not just the museums, but a coffee shop they once went to; a restaurant that has since closed. For, with very few exceptions, most of these people had been to New York. They had a New York story. New York was in their blood.
And it's in mine.
Given my early peripatetic nature, attending summer camps and then boarding school and university and moving to France several times before I was even 20, being a New Yorker made me stand out from a young age. While when I was a very small child, I was always baffled by television contests promising the winners "a trip for two to New York" ("Why would anyone want to come here?" was quickly supplanted by "But what do you get if you already live here?" because #enneagram1), being the only New Yorker in a sea of not-New-Yorkers was the closest thing I had to an identity before I really knew who I was. Being a New Yorker was important to me. Is still important to me, even though I've lived almost exactly as much time in Paris as I did in New York, and at least five of my years in the latter were mostly spent at the 96th street playground, and nine of them without the proper prescription for what I now know is my debilitatingly myopic eyesight, making my experience of the city that never sleeps a little bit, well, unfocused.
No matter how long I live in Paris, I will always feel like a New Yorker... but New York has surpassed me. A whole new wave of New Yorkers live there, people who never occupied the spaces I did; with whom it is impossible that I ever rode the subway or stood in line for bagels or brushed elbows with (oh, to brush elbows with a stranger) in a drunken, swaying line of people waiting for dollar slices at 2am. I used to be able to recite, tone-perfect, the announcements on the line 4, 5, and 6 train. "A free transfer is also available to the F train by walking to the Lexington Avenue 63rd Street station, and using, your MetroCard." But now when I ride the train, it's something akin to what happened when, after nearly a decade of punctuating my very rare visits to a Catholic church in France with under-my-breath recitations of what I remembered of the responsorial, returning to New York and hearing a chorus all around me say, not: "And also with you" but "And with your spirit." Things had changed in my absence. New York has changed in my absence.
But I still want an H&H Bagels t-shirt.
Illustration by Cesar Diaz
Things I'm Writing
1. Marie-Antoinette never said "let them eat cake," but the fact that we think she did is meaningful in and of itself. Why "you are what you eat" holds especially true if you're a French politician, for Life & Thyme.
 2. From the archives: in the wake of the announcement that the French baguette will soon be classed intangible cultural heritage by UNESCO, my story on the official best baguettes in Paris, for the BBC.
3. This bulgogi cheeseburger from chef Nyesha Arrington will ruin every other burger for you – and you can make it at home. For the Inside Hook.
Things I'm Reading
1. I came of age in post-9/11 NYC, so reading Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was at once heartbreaking and nostalgic, and for more reasons than one. It also made me ask myself (and my very close friend) if it would be derivative to continue to write my own in-progress 9/11 coming-of-age story, to which this dear, dear friend said to me: "Emily. No one wants to be Jonathan Safran Foer." (Also, she wants me to write the book.) More on the blog.
2. Intersectional fights for rights are often even more of an uphill climb, and this story of one man's journey to success in life and in advocacy as a Black, Deaf individual is awe-inspiring. In Represent Collaborative.
3. If Douglas Adams hated writing, you've (I've) got no excuse. In the Guardian.
A bientôt !