Sex, Cheese and French Fries--Women Are Perfect, Men Are from France

Carine Jr. Fabius

Description

Set in Hollywood, California, Sex, Cheese and French Fries is a witty look at relationships, using as premise an American woman's life with an irreverent Frenchman named Pierre Bonsoirno.

Beautifully illustrated by noted Los Angeles artist Jeannie Winston Nogai, each chapter of this book takes the reader on a journey of adventure, comic miscommunication, and ultimately the sublime rewards of falling — and staying — in love, as long as the partners are willing to work for it.

Sujets

• Sexualité
• sexualité
• Sexualité
• Fiction
• Romance
• Contemporary

Informations

• Publié par: eBookIt.com
• Date de parution: 21 février 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780978500344
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sex, Cheese and French Fries:
Women are Perfect, Men are from France
by Carine Fabius
 
 
Kouraj Press
6025 Santa Monica Boulevard
#202
Los Angeles, CA 90038
 
www.kourajpress.com
 
www.sexcheeseandfrenchfries.com
 
Copyright © 2012 by Carine Fabius
 
All illustrations are copyright © 2012 by Jeannie Winston.
 
Cover Design: Pascal Giacomini
 
Book Design: Aplomb Communications
 
Notice of Rights
All rights reserved under international and pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from the publisher except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written permission from the publisher.
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2006904088
Fabius, Carine
Sex, Cheese and French Fries: Women are Perfect, Men are from France
 
Published in eBook format by Kouraj Press
Converted by http://www.eBookIt.com
 
 
ISBN-13: 978-0-9785-0034-4
 


 
 
Also by Carine Fabius
Mehndi: The Art of Henna Body Painting
Jagua: A Journey into Body Art from the Amazon
Saturday Comes
Ceremonies for Real Life
 


 
 
For Pascal
 


Acknowledgements
There are so many people I want to thank for helping to make this book a reality that I barely know where to begin. First are the legions of kind friends and strangers who read various drafts of the book and took the time to give me essential, critical feedback, including Jeannie Winston Nogai, Cathy Fischer, Steven Landaal, Anne Wingate, Louis Hotchkiss, Felicia Filer, Sam Fleishman, Timothy McGowan, Cecilia Soriano, Carrie Roche, Becky Snodgrass, Frances Hayden, Judy Chaikin, Monica Copeland, Jill Ervais, Laura Shnitzer, Ulf Andersen, Karen Kaplan, Marie-Alice Mathon, Maggy Wooden, Nina Duval, Prudence Baird, Jacqueline Fabius, Phoebe Celestin, and Don Cosentino. I also value the encouragement I received from Karen Sedgley, Marguerite Lathan, and Melba Farquhar. I thank my agent Madeleine Perrone for believing in me as a writer, as well as all the editors who rejected the manuscript because it just wasn’t “there” yet. Infinite thanks go to Frank Weaver for his counsel, crucial insights, and outstanding editorial work on the manuscript. Many thanks and appreciation go to Henrietta Cosentino for coming up with the title of the book, and to my dear friends Cathy Fischer and Jeannie Winston Nogai, who helped come up with the concept for the cover. I am grateful for the vital support and valuable advice I received from Julie Logan, Mickey Cottrell, Michel Bocandé, and Peggy Coe. I owe a lot to Juergen Nogai for his priceless unintentional contributions to the book, and for his generosity of spirit. Lastly, I thank my sweet husband Pascal Giacomini for his love, unflinching positive outlook, constant support, and oft-needed boosts. Furthermore, I thank him for allowing me to shamelessly exploit his person in order to explore, like so many before me, the complex relationship between men and women. I also thank French people everywhere for being so French!
 
A Reminder Guide to Who’s Who
(In order of appearance)
The following is a list of the French people you’ll meet in this book. Since they have a penchant for similar-sounding hyphenated names in France, I thought this handy reference guide might be useful.

The Men
Jean-Marc ........................Pierre’s brother
Jean-Charles ....................Pierre’s friend and tour guide
Jean-Marie .......................Pierre’s cousin
Jean-Pierre .......................Pierre’s father
Jean-Marie LePenn ..........Fascist wannabe president of France
Jean-Philippe ....................Pierre’s former roommate
Jean-François ...................Another former roommate
Jean-Luc ...........................The pervert
Jean-Michel ......................Another cousin of Pierre’s
Jean-Jacques .....................Pierre’s hiking buddy
Jean-Bernard ....................Husband of Marie-Alice, both of whom hate my cooking, and rip us off
Jean-Claude ......................Artist friend of Pierre’s
Jean-Max ..........................Another artist friend of ours
Jean-Paul ..........................Acquaintance of Pierre’s, who comes to town for one evening
Jean-Richard .....................Cheese-shop owner in Chamonix
Jean-Robert .......................A friend who moved to Spain
 



 
The Women
Marice-Claude .................Pierre’s father’s wife
Marie-Florence ................Pierre’s sister-in-law
Marie-Alice ......................Jean-Bernard’s wife
Marie-France ...................Pierre’s mother
Marie-Christine ................Pierre’s sister
Marie-Solange ..................Friend, who reminds me of my verbal faux pas
Marie-Jeanne ....................Pierre’s aunt
Marie-Rose ........................Friend, whom I run into at Rite-Aid
 


A Note from the Author
In the interest of full disclosure and clarity, this book was inspired by life with my French husband. It is not a work of non-fiction. Well, it sort of is. Except that it’s fiction because I have taken the liberty of making things up throughout. The characters’ names have been changed because some are composites of people we know, while others are based on real people, except they’re not really real because I made up a lot of what they said. In other words, no one is allowed to ask the question, Did that really happen? I will simply refuse to answer. I hope this helps to explain the category in which this book belongs. Sort of.

 


 
 
Sex, Cheese
and French Fries
Woman are Perfect, Men are from France
 
1 - My French Husband

Help! My husband is French!
Some people disagree with me on this, but I say relationships are work. That’s not a negative comment on how hard it can be to maintain your sanity when you live with someone who seems bent on driving you crazy. Work is not a bad thing. Most things worth having require time, energy, patience, and a good nighttime mouth-guard for all that teeth-grinding, and relationships are no different. But my husband is French, so I feel that puts me in a special category, as in, I have special needs . Why? Although I’m happily married, I have to say that the French can be…difficult? That question mark is not indicative of a real question. It’s more in line with that way we Californians have of inserting a question mark at the end of any statement because the speaker seeks your agreement? In any case, it’s true that the French are special, even though I admit that the more I hear women talk about their husbands, the more it seems we’re all married to a bunch of crazy foreigners.
Pierre Bonsoirno Is Born
In the war between the sexes, it’s good to have allies. When your husband tells you that he took the dog with him to visit friends who raise chickens because she needs to learn that she can’t eat live chickens! with the same intensity as If you want to see a therapist you can go by yourself! —you know you might need to stock up on boxing gloves. You also know that you might need a little help along the way.
My husband’s name is not actually Pierre Bonsoirno. It was our friend, Jackson, who started calling him Pierre—more like Pee-erre , really—whenever he went into insufferable French mode.
“Listen, Pee-erre , I’m not finished,” Jackson says one day, voice raised and aggressive after being interrupted by my French husband ( MFH for short) eight times in five minutes. He then turns and looks at me to make sure I know he is kidding. I start giggling at the Pee-erre thing, and like a six-year-old, happy with his audience’s reaction, Jackson turns back to MFH and gets even louder.
“I’m sick and tired of you thinking you know every goddamn thing in the world, Pee-erre . Yeah.” He turns to look at me again and we all start snickering, including MFH, the busted Frenchman.
I’ve known Jackson about 22 years, and MFH has known him as long as he’s known me, which is about 17 years. Jackson looks like the long, skinny character named Jack in The Nightmare Before Christmas —just add neck-to-ankle tattoos, always impeccably polished-red toenails, piercings everywhere but in his hair, which is spiky, purple, striped, twisted, braided, or shaved off, depending on the month. He’s a rock-and-roll musician; a genius, really. Knows how to play 20 instruments if any, and he’s usually broke, or in the money, big time. Jackson was around, back in 1990, when MFH and I came up with the idea of turning our home into an art gallery. We’d been to the Caribbean island of Haiti on vacation and returned with dozens of paintings that quickly filled the walls of our house. Friends kept asking if we would agree to bring art back for them on our next trip, if they fronted the cash. Around the same time, someone told us about a guy she had met who made $100,000 the year before, selling African art out of his home. I found the idea appealing. I was in the public relations business then, and something about selling art felt more attractive than dealing with journalists, who despised publicists as a rule, never returned your calls, and made you take them out to dinner and beg before writing a few meager lines about your hateful, self-indulgent clients. I know this sounds like a dream job, but a few days later I cornered MFH in the hallway.
“I was thinking that maybe we should sell Haitian art out of this house; what do you think?”
“I was just thinking the same thing yesterday,” he said.
Next thing we knew, we were on a plane to Haiti, borrowed up to our hairlines, to buy our first collection of Haitian art.
Those were heady days. We’d just come back from the Caribbean with our treasures, trying hard as we could to stave off the panic of having to come up with enough money to frame the work, ins