Authored Books

MONSIEUR MEDIOCRE

One American Learns the High Art of Being Everyday French

August 2020 | 256 pages | Paperback ISBN 978-0735224858
Published by Penguin Random House — see on publisher’s website.
Order from Amazon.

Publisher’s book description

A hilarious, candid account of what life in France is actually like, from a writer for Vanity Fair and GQ

Americans love to love Paris. We buy books about how the French parent, why French women don’t get fat, and how to be Parisian wherever you are. While our work hours increase every year, we think longingly of the six weeks of vacation the French enjoy, imagining them at the seaside in stripes with plates of fruits de mer.

John von Sothen fell in love with Paris through the stories his mother told of her year spent there as a student. And then, after falling for and marrying a French waitress he met in New York, von Sothen moved to Paris. But fifteen years in, he’s finally ready to admit his mother’s Paris is mostly a fantasy. In this hilarious and delightful collection of essays, von Sothen walks us through real life in Paris–not only myth-busting our Parisian daydreams but also revealing the inimitable and too often invisible pleasures of family life abroad.

Relentlessly funny and full of incisive observations, Monsieur Mediocre is ultimately a love letter to France–to its absurdities, its history, its ideals–but it’s a very French love letter: frank, smoky, unsentimental. It is a clear-eyed ode to a beautiful, complex, contradictory country from someone who both eagerly and grudgingly calls it home.

Selected reviews

Named one of the best travel books in the New York Times‘s “Summer Reading” list

“John von Sothen’s memoir of Parisian expat life … offers dozens of these inside-baseball insights into a place that continues to mystify and enchant … von Sothen offers some delicious, uniquely French details.”
—The Washington Post

“What do you need to know about the places you’re going? A dozen new books answer this question in strikingly idiosyncratic ways, wreathing their authors’ wanderings in vivid back story—sometimes emotional, sometimes empirical, sometimes imperial—enveloping the reader in a kind of legible Sensurround. These books ought to come with 3-D glasses and a soundtrack … The American writer John von Sothen crushed out on a more universally recognized source of allure, a beautiful Frenchwoman, whom he met in a bistro in Brooklyn at the turn of the millennium. Soon his love for that woman, Anaïs, launched him across the Atlantic to Paris, where he remains today. Monsieur Mediocre records his love affair with France and with Anaïs (whom he married), and his continuing, bumbling attempts to carry off la vie Parisienne with something approaching grace—or, at least, skirting calamity.”
—The New York Times

“This book made me laugh out loud on the subway. J’adore every jaded character, every hilarious insight, and every upended stereotype. Most of all I felt this hum of love—for France, for family, and for life, really—that gives every essay a beguiling depth.”
—Maeve Higgins, author of Maeve in America