I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center. ― Kurt Vonnegut

It’s strange to think that I’ve lived more of my life in France than in the United States.

Does that make me French? Or am I American? Am I neither? Or maybe I’m a little bit of both. If a passport tells me who I am, then I am most definitely American. But identity is rarely as simple as a passport.

I was recently talking with a good friend — a Swedish woman who has spent almost as much time living in Italy as I have in France, married to an Italian, as I am, well, to a Frenchman — about roots. It’s such a complicated, multifaceted notion, and immeasurably personal. Roots means something different to each of us, doesn’t it? We feel it differently, define it differently.

I call the United States — Florida, where I grew up — home. I also call France, wherever I happen to be living at the moment, home. But the word carries a different weight in each place. And yet, if I am honest, I have never felt entirely at home in either country. Not fully natural in the United States — which is, perhaps, why I left — and not entirely belonging here in France. I exist comfortably enough in both, but I do not completely fit in either.

Living between countries creates a peculiar condition: you are always slightly foreign.

But there is an advantage to that, and one I embraced long ago: not fitting in is liberating. It frees you from society’s expectations — how you should look, how you should dress, how you should act, what you should talk about, who you are meant to be. Once I freed myself from the way others saw me, and from who I was supposed to be, the possibilities of (re)inventing myself felt endless. I would never be properly French, so my faux pas, small and not so small, were indulged and forgiven; those blunders and my oddities were racked up to my being American.

So why not inhabit that space entirely?

I have always lived fully immersed in French society rather than on its outskirts, never within an expat community. And yet, no matter how I try or what I do, I know I will never completely fit in. I will never be considered French by the French.

But, to be honest, I don’t want to be. I’m not even sure I’ve ever tried.

In a society that dictates conformity — with its strict, if elegant, social codes and unspoken but rigid cultural structures — my refusal to fit the mold, my otherness, has paradoxically allowed me a lot of wiggle room. Once I accepted that I would always stand slightly apart, there was only one thing left to do: embrace it. Lean into it. Perhaps even flaunt my uniqueness (or individuality?).

I never wanted to be “an expat,” just as I was never entirely happy living in the States. I have never felt like I fit in expatriate circles — even among fellow Americans, I felt oddly foreign. My unwillingness to conform has often been interpreted as strangeness, messy, and impossible to place. Expectations, after all, are tidy. Predictable. Safe. People feel comfortable with someone they understand, whose behaviors they can anticipate, who is like themselves. While extremely polite and kind, they rarely include someone they can’t easily categorize. But I have never been particularly interested in safe and predictable, and expectations are boring. If rejecting both meant that I was myself kept at a distance, then I’d be okay with that.

Identity, then, is less about citizenship or even acceptance and more about comfort with that in-between space where you are fully yourself. I move easily between the two cultures, yet wholly inhabit neither. And perhaps that is precisely where I belong.

I’d been working on this piece for a few days when I was suddenly reminded of the strange story of my younger son, and as I don’t think he reads my Substack, I’ll share it here, as briefly as I can. It’s a story of identity and roots: My sons have two passports — French and American — and were raised between two countries — France and Italy — Italy, where we moved when they were 3 and 1 years old. As daycare didn’t exist (or didn’t at the time) in Italy — everyone, apparently, has a nonna — my younger son stayed at home with me until he was 3, hearing, but not yet speaking, English and French. When he was 3 (his brother 5) and ready for pre-school, we decided to put them both in the Italian school system. Why choose to live in another country if you’re not going to completely immerse yourself in that country and culture, right? So my son, who hadn’t quite yet begun to fully speak either English or French (his brother spoke both), was suddenly thrown into the Italian deep end of the swimming pool. I’ll make this long story short, just saying that it took him more than 2 years before he seemed comfortable with his situation.

When he was 8 and about to enter the 3rd grade, we moved back to France. Because of logistics, we unwillingly put him and his brother into the French school system. At that point, we knew he was quite fluent in all 3 languages, but in school, he struggled on so many levels until he graduated high school, developing a hard, angry shell and a defiant antagonism toward France and its school system, as if defining himself against it were the only way to survive it.

We don’t know how he got through the school system but, with infinite thanks to a private tutor that we give all credit to, he did. Over the years, we tried to uncover what was causing his anger and his problems in school (language, communication, attitude) by taking him to a series of specialists. None helped. Just after his high school graduation we finally found a professional who could help. Our son was asked to take an IQ test, which he did. The results astounded the professionals helping us. One explained: never before had they seen such a huge disparity between performance and verbal IQs.

They explained that this split suggested he had rejected a primary language and that, somewhere along the way, he had subconsciously rejected embracing an identity, or a primary identity, because with language comes identity. Our son had long felt that others had been deciding who he was for him, telling him he was Italian or American or French, rather than allowing him the space to choose his identity on his own terms. It is through a primary language and our accepted inner identity, the therapists told us, that we filter every other language and culture we encounter. It is how we learn social cues, how we grasp nuance, navigate cultural codes and norms, no matter how subtle. It becomes the internal framework through which we function in the world.

So we learned, alongside our son, that identity is partially given to us - shaped by where we are born, where we live, by whom and how we are raised and educated - but it is also something we must claim for ourselves.

I do love living in Chinon. Odd how I have felt more comfortable and accepted in a small, conservative town the size of Chinon than I ever did in a larger, more diverse city. But I do like it here. Beyond my enduring fascination for this medieval city and its wildly compelling history, I’m happy living in a place where I know everyone and everyone knows me. The gossip, the conviviality, the daily rhythms and rituals of a small tourist town.

In a small town, difference is visible but manageable. I move in and out of recognition — a peculiar kind of local notoriety and curious anonymity — greeting and being greeted by restaurant owners, shopkeepers, neighbors, while also remaining just another body out for a stroll. People know who I am, and yet they don’t really know me — the intrigue of being an unknown quantity. There is something thrilling about standing at the threshold between notice and obscurity. I have always loved living there, out on the edge. Being mysterious might be part of the persona I embrace. And there is less pressure to perform Frenchness.

And yet — comfort has its limits. Comfort is not the same as fulfillment.

I have always been drawn to the energy of unpredictability and change. After five years or so in one place, I begin to feel the sameness. I start itching for a new city, a new country, a new culture — to discover the people, the food, the noise, the particular way life arranges itself and is lived elsewhere. Curiosity, for me, has an expiration date when it needs to be recharged.

But if I’m being honest — and that’s what this space is for, right? — it isn’t only curiosity. It’s restlessness. It’s anxiety. It’s an urgency I feel deep down in my gut to reinvent myself over and over again. I know it’s an illusion, a very seductive illusion, the idea that I can move to another city and become another version of myself.

I have spent a lifetime confusing movement with transformation, believing that a new address might succeed where I had not, that geography could somehow outrun whatever imagined failures trailed behind me. That I’ll find the place where I don’t feel out of step, where I can succeed at all of my projects where I hadn’t before. Start afresh whenever I unpack all the moving cartons. The conviction that somewhere else might feel more aligned not with who I am but with who I want to be, and with the way I want to live, think, and create.

So is roots and identity more about how we see ourselves, how we feel with ourselves, rather than how we interact with where we are at any given moment? Maybe it’s always being challenged and tested when we allow ourselves to think beyond our given place. But then, maybe I think too much about it.

So then why do I feel so passionate about — fiercely protective, almost territorial over — French cuisine?

I grew up in a culture in which food came with stories and carried deep symbolism. Even before I understood the word “culture,” I felt cultural differences. I knew that what my mother cooked at home was not what my friends were eating in theirs. I understood that food told a story about who we were and where we came from.

Later, raising sons with multiple passports, multiple languages, several cultures, food became something more deliberate. Each dish we prepared was served with stories, history, folklore and legends, gestures and memories. Food was the perfect vehicle for imparting each of their separate inheritances, to help them comprehend and accept who they are, every beautiful part of them.

Perhaps that is why French cuisine feels personal to me. Not because it is “mine,” but because I understand what cuisine holds. It is history and culture made tangible. Living in France, living totally immersed in a traditional French family, I came to understand this cuisine not as spectacle, but as daily practice. Not as something elevated, iconic, romantic, but as something ordinary, structured, rooted in rhythm and repetition. I paid attention for years — in markets, in neighbors’ kitchens, in the ritual organization of meals that were neither grand nor performative. And when I later began writing about food, I found myself frustrated by the way French cuisine was often presented to Americans: placed on a pedestal, flattened into romantic cliché, reduced to icons of sophistication, technique, and luxury.

What I knew — what I had lived — was something far more textured. More practical. More human and everyday. And I wanted to show that. No — I felt like I needed to share that.

Do I feel responsible? Hmmm, maybe. Sometimes. The cookbooks that come out each year are set against impossibly beautiful backdrops, their recipes polished into something almost unrecognizable, either complicated restaurant versions or modern dishes that could be found in any nice kitchen anywhere. The dishes I learned in real, often humble French kitchens are simple, economical, generous — rooted in season and symbolism rather than elegant show — dishes meant to be cooked in every home, every day of the week, for family and friends.

I may not feel French, but I am now rooted in this culture and understand it so well, its rhythms, rituals, habits; I understand this cuisine because I have lived with it — day after day, year after year. And I want others to see it that way too. To experience it as it is and as it is lived, not as it is imagined.

I may never belong in the way others expect belonging to look, I may never feel entirely French, but I am rooted here nonetheless, in the ways that matter. I understand this culture because I have lived it for so long, in the rituals of daily life, the attention to cultural details, both large and small. I might not claim all of it as my own, but I know it and understand it well enough to translate it. And like my other home, the country that I left, I care enough to stand up for it; I feel a part of it enough to insist on its nuance when it is reduced to myth and cliché. That is something I can do through its food.

On a side note:

The hôtel has just reopened after our three-week winter closure, though vacation it was not. We spent the time watching television, making orange marmalade, and listening to the steady soundtrack of workers renovating the second floor. They repainted the woodwork, doors, and ceilings, recarpeted the two stairwells and the hallway, and finally ripped out the fifty-year-old fabric clinging to the walls, replacing the faded and stained cloth with elegant paper. Everything feels fresh and beautifully transformed.

My husband is renovating the last of the twenty-seven rooms. And finally, for the first time since we bought the place, everything will be done.

* my husband actually called me this today, so….

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