Product Description

She has a job in Paris, a handsome Frenchman, a beautiful bilingual toddler, and an adorable apartment with breathtaking views. So why does Catherine Sanderson feel that her life is coming apart? Stuck in a relationship quickly losing its heat, overwhelmed by the burdens of motherhood, and restless in a dead-end job, Catherine reads an article about starting an online diary, and on a slow day at work–voilà–Petite Anglaise is born. But what begins as a lighthearted diversion, a place to muse on the fish-out-of-water challenges of expat life, soon gives way to a raw forum where Catherine shares intimate details about her relationship, her discontents, and her most impulsive desires. When one of her readers–a charming Englishman–tries to get close to the girl behind the blog, Catherine’s real and virtual personas collide, forcing her to choose between life as she knows it and the possibility of more.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #552756 in Books
• Published on: 2009-06-09
• Released on: 2009-06-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780385522816
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Customer Reviews

Fun to read, especially as a former ex-pat; didn't like the disloyalty
WARNING: SPOILER.

For those of you who have lived abroad, this is a fun read. However, I was not comfortable with the public deception. Even though the character is not married, she and her long term partner had a baby together and her partner deserved more respect, particularly since this is a true story and the character maintains a not-very-private blog. In other words, I appreciate that we can fall out of love with our partners, but I can't imagine her partner appreciated the public display of her complaints about their relationship and about her feelings for another man.

Aside from that, I enjoyed her descriptions of Paris, her love affair with another culture and her honesty regarding being a working mom.

Delightful debut..........
Having followed Petite's blog off and on over a couple years, I actually had no intention of purchasing the book. Only because I thought perhaps it would be redundant of all her blog posts that I'd read. Wanting to support a fellow author, and because I'd always enjoyed her style of writing, I did pre-order this book.....and I was happily pleased.
First of all, I was impressed with the way Sanderson combined her blog postings effortlessly into a woven piece of work that read like fiction. I did recall a few of the incidents I'd previously read on her blog, but now written in a different way.
This is a delightful debut of a story that just happens to be true. The reader is allowed a glimpse behind the scenes, so to speak. I felt the depth of this author's writing was even stronger in her book than on her blog....and her writing on Petite Anglaise was excellent. But somehow I detected more emotion here than on her blog pages. So I was quite wrong to assume "it'll be identical to her blog."
Like the previous reader, I read this in two days. Much like her blog, I found myself setting the book down, only to be compelled to quickly resume reading.
Wishing much success to this author and looking forward to her fiction release.

Girl meets blog
As her memoir opens, Catherine Sanderson has become an unhappy person. She loves her one-year-old daughter but finds motherhood demanding and frustrating. She is discontent in her relationship with her long-time partner. And even Paris, the city in which she's dreamed of living since childhood, is losing its luster for her.

So she finds a new love, ripe to be showered with devotion and attention. Well, she also has an affair. But the real object of Catherine's affection in the memoir Petite Anglaise is not "Jim from Rennes," who becomes her new boyfriend, but rather her blog, also called Petite Anglaise. Indeed, on a dull afternoon when her various sources of malcontent seem insurmountable, Catherine opens a page on her computer and starts writing. And then hits "publish," and a relationship is born.

This is the first memoir I've read about a girl and her blog. (The memoir "Julie and Julia" by Julie Powell stemmed from a blog, but the author makes only passing mention of it in the narrative, whereas for Sanderson it is a key player in her life.) At first, the blog is a creative outlet and an escape, but it gradually takes on the role of savior. Through her blog, she not only vents her feelings but also experiments a little bit. Like a lot of people, Catherine is a little more clever, a little sassier, a little more adventuresome in her writing than in her real life. Although she initially believes Petite Anglaise is merely a reflection of herself, she eventually comes to recognize that it is more, and as her life develops in new directions - she makes new friends through the blog, breaks up with her partner, and starts an affair with a reader - she gradually begins to question whether she is living through her character, whether her character is controlling her, or just what the releationship between the two -- the real Catherine Sanderson and the blog persona - might be.

Artists have explored the relationships between themselves and their creations ever since the myth of Pygmalion, and the fact that Sanderson uses the state-of-the-art social media to do it doesn't make this an entirely new story, but as blogging and other forms of social media such as Facebook becomes epidemic, it's interesting to think about who we are in relation to our screen selves. Sanderson isn't a fascinating or even always likable person, but she's willing to admit that, both to her memoir readers and to readers of her blog. She struggles with her decisions, and for every time she second-guesses herself, most notably when she breaks up with her daughter's father, she has dozens of blog readers chiming in with their own opinions in the "comments" section of her blog. The unexamined life may not be worth living, as Socrates said; the overexamined life, brought to us by Netscape, presents a whole other set of challenges.

Beyond the questions of blogging and self-reflection, Sanderson simply has an interesting story to tell about life as an ex-pat and young mother in Paris. She loves the city but struggles with its limitations - the daycare situation, the difficulty of finding a suitable apartment, even the dingy appearance of the city of light in late winter - and this memoir is enlightening for those aspects as well as the ones related to social media. Sanderson isn't always a terrific writer, and her romantic scenes border on the Harlequin-esque, but possibly that's the point, to some extent. She's not a great writer but we like reading about her anyway, because she's so candid and so real. And that may be the beauty of blogging.