Breathless

August 12, 2013
In a graceful, aching memoir of her ingénue years in Paris, comparative literature professor and author Miller (What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past) re-creates a time of fledgling sexual liberation and rueful homecoming. Breaking away from home with her intellectual, Jewish parents in Manhattan, where she had felt “conned” to live during her college years at Barnard, Miller blissfully took off for study at the Sorbonne in fall of 1961, resolved to be the Jean Seberg character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and be adventurous and independent. In that pre-feminist era, she quickly learned that sleeping with men was effortless but achieving sexual satisfaction was not. In her naivety, as her time in Paris lengthened and she won a Fulbright teaching fellowship, she often confused sex with finding the right “dream-companion” á la Simone de Beauvoir, and was frequently disappointed, from falling for the leather-clad beatnik on the motorcycle, Leo; the earnest Tunisian student Bernard, who wanted to marry her; and the overbearing Irishman Jim Donovan, the head of a self-run language school, who hired her and married her. In her sweetly ironical, fondly forgiving look back at her youth, it actually took an affair with a humble German carpenter named Hans to help Miller escape her “nice-Jewish-girl destiny” and find her way home again.

December 15, 2013
A coming-of-age tale covering the author's 20s in Paris, where she studied, worked, lived on her own for the first time, fell in and out of love, and found solid ground beneath her feet. Miller (English and Comparative Literature/Graduate Center, CUNY; What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, 2011, etc.) has previously mined her past in memoirs about herself and the lives of her parents. This book takes its name from the Godard film, which inspired the author, upon graduating from Barnard College in 1961, to move to Paris at 21. While studying at the Sorbonne, Miller sought freedom from her parents' incessant meddling and attempted to swap her "nice-Jewish-girl" identity for a life of sophistication and romance. She writes of her transformation from wide-eyed naif ("I didn't set out to sleep with Philippe") to a confident, individualized woman capable of making her own decisions--about whom to date, where to live and work, and the direction of her future. Repeatedly, she revisits her perceived lack of self-understanding and the myriad experiences that informed her self-awareness and capacity to recognize and give voice to her own desires. Miller's first year in France truly represented a necessary break from the lifelong pressures of "les parents terribles," and it was followed by more space after she received a Fulbright teaching fellowship, enabling her to stay longer. After a couple years, Miller met and eloped with an older American expat who ran a language school. The book's final half is dominated by the marriage's highs and lows, the latter of which contributed even more fully to Miller's break from controlling influences and resulted in her trusting her own judgment. Originally in search of salvation from her family, Miller found the external adventures she'd craved and painful ones she hadn't anticipated, and she went through a deeply personal transformation. Articulate, keen and satisfying.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 1, 2013
In the early 1960s, college students flocked to Europe, and Paris was the pinnacle of every trip. No wonder Miller finds herself drawn to the City of Lights for her first excursion away from the confines of her conservative, middle-class Jewish home. After graduation from Barnard College, she persuades her parents to let her study in France, where she promptly pushes aside American conservatism for more liberal sexual and intellectual mores. Miller's memoir will resonate with women who, over the years, have been fascinated by Jean Seberg's role as Patricia in the Godard film Breathless (1960). The movie is frequently cited for Patricia's independence, self-assurance, and fearlessnesstraits Miller seeks. Her look back is filled with vintage vignettes of garret apartments, matronly concierges, and the silk-lingerie splurges of a poor young student's milieu. She considers marriage to a Tunisian man, suffers through an illegal abortion, and ends up with an American expatriate who is more con man than the connoisseur he pretends to be. Readers may wish for even more photographs as Miller's memoir captures that influential era's essence.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)