The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the Podglamorate Network and LIT Hub Radio.

Hello, we travel today to Paris, a place I have been for weeks at a time, but where I only skim the surface.

I've never studied or worked there as I have in other places.

For the most part, I was stuck in my own body,

feeling the anxiety of being a stranger where other people felt at home.

I skim the surface. I skim the surface like a skater on top of a

frozen pond maybe or maybe even more so like an eager person on the edge of a lake

gazing at the water thinking there must be something going on under the surface

but I'm only able to see a reflection of myself, which is not what I want at all.

I don't want to see my own image. My physical image. That's the part of me I'm trying to escape.

I want to dive in to forget to experience what's inside. I don't want to skim and skate and stare. I want to swim.

Hopefully this will all make sense to you after we talk to our guest today who does come to us from

Paris and who knows something about swimming herself. Swimming in a couple of

senses of the word, the literal sense of going to swimming pools in Paris and learning an activity

that she didn't know she would enjoy, but also the sense of being in a place,

within a place, swimming in Paris.

Goldfish only know the world of the water in their bowl.

So too do young children growing up only know the world of their world.

In this case, her world was Paris, a particular slice of Paris,

with lefty intellectual Jewish parents living in the aftermath of the Depression, World War II,

the Holocaust, and the Free Love 60s.

What does that mean to be a child of the 70s and the 80s to grow up as the product of that

...