Have you ever wondered how French women live life on their own terms? They seem to have conquered the modern world, with all its pressures and conflicting signals, while many of us elsewhere are struggling to balance love, sex, work and family. What French Women Know about Love, Sex and Other Matters of Heart and Mind, by Debra Ollivier, debunks long-standing myths about French women, and lets us in on the ways they have learned to take life as they want to live it. Going beyond the cliches of Gallic glamour, Ollivier looks at the guiding principles that play out in the French woman's world to challenge our own cherished notions about body politics, seduction and flirtation; sex and love; dating and marriage; motherhood and raising children. With fresh guiding metaphors from French sexperts, authors, actors and more, What French Women Know will reframe your cultural prejudices, providing more realistic and life-affirming alternatives from a culture that loves to love - and has been doing so for centuries.

About the Author

Debra Ollivier's work has appeared in Harper's, Playboy, Le Monde, and the Guardian. A bilingual American with French citizenship, Ollivier currently lives with her French husband and two children in Los Angeles.

Reviews

Ollivier's manifesto belongs in that rare class of books that must be listened to on audio rather than read in print. Her performance of her own book is so delicious and pitch-perfect that it demands a hearing, if for nothing else than the hilarious recounted conversations between herself and various French female interlocutors, whom she presents with a faultless blend of Gallic style and nonchalance. Her accent is impeccable-to American ears, anyway-achieved during a decade of living in France and being married to a Frenchman. As she wends her way through love, sex, food, sex, child-rearing, sex, politics, and more sex, Ollivier compares American women's neuroticism and anxiety to French women's devil-may-care attitude. Vive la difference! A Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 12). (Aug.) Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

'Try it out for Gallic girl attitude' GLAMOUR