Two things happened the year I turned eleven: my father died and I became friends with my first professional chef, a guy named Jacques.

My mother, distressed at my sadness over the loss of my father, tried to cure it with the one thing she knew I still loved: an extraordinary meal. One day, after she closed her shop, she announced that we wouldn't be going home to have dinner with her new husband, Hugo, and my baby sister. Instead we were going to the restaurant in the same complex of shops as her own, Chez Jacques.

"It is almost impossible to get a table," my mother said, smiling conspiratorially. "But why don't you and I go, just the two of us?"

I smiled for the first time in weeks. A night out alone with my mother? At an exclusive restaurant? It was like Christmas had come early.

As we approached Chez Jacques, my mother whispered, "Let me do the talking. They say the chef is a lunatic."

We were greeted at the door by Mercedes Quillacq, a voluptuous blond Spanish woman in her midforties. I had never met her but she greeted my mother as if they were old friends, and she seated us with a flourish that implied we were honored guests. The restaurant was rustic and simple. I would later learn that Jacques had built the entire establishment himself and that the dining room was actually the first floor of the family home. There were maybe twenty seats and an open plan kitchen, which was unusual for the time. There was no menu, just a set meal for the night. You ate what Jacques prepared, and you paid a hefty price for the pleasure.

From my seat at the table I could see Jacques at work in the kitchen: short and muscular, he wore a white chef's jacket with short sleeves and sweated with the force of a man who was all at once chef, sous-chef, and dishwasher. In one pot, he cooked pasta. In another, he made green beans. The industrial oven churned out culinary masterpieces, seemingly on its own. Now there's a platter of caramel pork. Look, there's a camembert en chemise (a version of brie en croute). And is that a roast duck? Watching Jacques cook for an entire restaurant, alone and happy in his kitchen, was like going to the circus and watching a master juggler spin a hundred plates. I was mesmerized.

I quickly learned that while the food was indeed legendary, part of what kept Chez Jacques packed was the show he put on. You did not choose to eat at Chez Jacques. Jacques chose you.

Ten minutes after we sat down, the door opened. A well-dressed man walked in and greeted Jacques, whose eyes immediately narrowed.

"Get out!" he snarled.

The man was understandably startled and tried to politely introduce himself. "Uh, je suis Monsieur Veysette…."

"Who sent you?"

"Uh…"

"Get out!" Jacques yelled, and so the man did as he asked and left.

My mother and I sat in silence, watching the drama unfold with both amusement and awe. My pleasure in being there grew, just knowing that we had been lucky to be let in the front door.

A few minutes later, another couple arrived.

"Who sent you?" Jacques barked.

"No one. We saw…"

"Welcome, welcome," Jacques said, suddenly switching to the warm tone of a mâitre'd in a famed Parisian bistro. "Mercedes, please see to it that they get the best table!"

My mother whispered to me, "Chef Jacques is known for kicking even the most elite residents of Andorra out of his restaurant. He takes great pleasure in telling the richest people in town to go screw themselves, but the food is so good, they always come back." She went on to explain that Jacques was ex–French Legion and he wasn't impressed with power. He'd survived the Battle of Dien Bien Phu; he didn't care about the vice-president of the local hydroelectric company or a retired British footballer. Naturally, the spectacle only made Chez Jacques more of a destination. "Whatever you do," my mother warned, "don't ask for salt."

When the dishes arrived, it was clear that we were being presented with more than a meal: this was a gift. The salad was composed as if Jacques had spent the afternoon in the garden, picking each green leaf himself. The coq au vin was so rich and satisfying that I had to resist the urge to lick the plate when I was done. When the meal was over, Jacques sent over not two small bowls of chocolate mousse, but nearly a tub of the stuff. My eyes widened at the heft of it; then I quickly and happily polished off the whole dish.

Jacques walked over to the table just as I was shoveling the last heaping spoon of mousse into my mouth. He looked pleased.

"The young man has a good appetite," he said, winking at me.

"C'est trop, Monsieur Jacques," I replied, respectfully. And it was—the very best meal I'd ever had.

"Do you want a tour of the factory?" Jacques asked, gesturing for me to follow him to the kitchen.

My mother nodded her permission and I eagerly followed Jacques back to the kitchen and propped myself onto a barstool for a better view. I pointed at the salads Jacques was making.

"How did you get the vinaigrette so creamy?" I asked.

He smiled at the question. "That's a secret," he said. "Come back one day and I'll show you."

The next day after school, instead of heading to the stockroom above my mother's boutique, I went to Chez Jacques. I sat on the same barstool, eating bowl after bowl of baba au rhum, and listened as he told me stories about his years in the military.

Jacques was what was called a titi Parisien, a kind of scrappy, working-class guy who grew up on the not-fancy streets of Paris, like Robert De Niro in New York. He spent his career as a parachutist with the French army and had done tours of duty in Vietnam, Egypt, and Algeria. I learned more about history from him than I did from any schoolbook.

"You've read about the coalition between Germany, France, and Great Britain against Egypt when they tried to nationalize the Suez Canal?" he asked as he rubbed a leg of lamb with salt for that evening's meal.

I had never heard of the Suez Canal, but I nodded my head vigorously in the hopes that he'd keep talking and serving me sweets.

"Alors. Each country had their own black market of goods," Jacques explained. "Crates of everything from caviar to licorice. Well, one day, we heard that the British had gotten ahold of some fresh vegetables, so we traded with them—a crate of whiskey for a crate of arugula, endives, and romaine. They just wanted to get drunk! But we said, 'The French must eat the way God intended man to eat!' "

He laughed so hard at the memory that he had to brace himself on the counter. "Can you imagine? Trading whiskey for some greens? But that is war, young man. That is what war is really about: going after the thing you didn't value until you were in the position to lose it."

I was only a kid but I thought I understood what he meant, because I had, that afternoon, spent one of the happiest days in recent memory. The school year loomed ahead, and I was sure that nothing would top the few hours I had spent watching Jacques cook and listening to his stories about parachuting out of planes and conducting secret maneuvers in foreign lands.

My mother worked six days a week at her boutique, but she cooked like a Michelin-starred chef every single night. The table was always set with fresh flowers and a beautiful tablecloth. She shopped every day at the markets. We began each meal with a delicious starter: maybe an onion soup or a big rustic salad made of blanched and raw vegetables, apple, avocado, radishes, potato, haricots verts, corn—all from a roadside market, not the grocery store. For the main course, there would be something cooked à la minute, like a pepper steak, or something she'd prepped since the morning, like a roast shoulder of lamb. There was always dessert too: a fruit dish, like pears in red wine, on the weekdays and something more elaborate, like a flan or a mixed berry tart, on her day off. It was a badge of honor for my mother that at a time when women were asking if they could have it all, she did.

That evening when she came to collect me, her eyes went straight to the dirty dessert bowl sitting next to me. She knew me well enough to know that there was no way I had eaten just one serving. I could tell she was annoyed at what was certain to be an enormous bill and at my rudeness in ruining my appetite for the dinner she'd prepared at home.

But when my mother asked Jacques for the bill, throwing me an impatient glare, he just waved her off.

"No charge, madame," he said. "The boy has been washing dishes all day. It is I who should pay him." Then he winked at me and smiled.

This was, needless to say, a lie for my protection, and the pure tenderness of the gesture almost made me cry.

"Come back anytime," Jacques said. I wondered if he meant it or if he was just being polite.

"Tomorrow?" I asked, shyly.

"Why not?" he answered.

"Will there be chocolate mousse the next time?" I asked, feeling bolder.

Jacques laughed, a full-bodied laugh that I would get to know well. And my mother, who in those days did not laugh very often, laughed too.

"There is always chocolate mousse at Chez Jacques," he said.

Proust had his madeleine and because of Jacques, I have my mousse. Every time I dig into a bowl of that chocolate velvet, I am a kid again, running to Chez Jacques after school. It is the taste of friendship. It is the taste of belly laughs, and war stories, and the memory of a man who could jump out of planes and make a leg of lamb with equal amounts of skill and ardor. But more than anything, chocolate mousse is the taste of being welcomed; of Chez Jacques, where for me, the door was always open.

In 1961, Paul Newman and Sidney Poitier came to Paris to make a movie about jazz, love, and possibility. In the film, Paul Newman plays a jazz musician who sees the most beautiful girl, played by Diahann Carroll, while walking down the street. She's not interested in him, but she takes a liking to his friend, Sidney Poitier, and it just so happens that her pal, Joanne Woodward, thinks Paul Newman is kind of cute. So the pairs switch around and go about the business of falling in love, but in the end, each of the men and each of the women must go off on their own path. There is no happily ever after for these couples, only happy to have met you.

Not too long after that movie debuted, my parents met in the south of France. In time, they would do their own switching around of partners and falling in and out of love. But where the lovers in Paris Blues had only themselves to worry about, my parents' choices affected me too, and I felt shuffled and tossed about by all of the changes. Despite all that would come afterward, the first five years of my life were so happy and bright that decades cannot diminish the sunshine and warmth that I feel when I look back at that time. My parents' greatest gift to me was this: a model of love that was so big, it felt like the stuff of movies and songs. It wasn't an endless love, but it was a gift all the same.

This is where it began: on a road lined with olive trees, on a bright summer day in Cagnes-sur-Mer, the largest suburb of the city of Nice. My mother, Monique, was waiting for the No. 44 bus. She had golden brown skin, the skin of a girl who has spent her whole life in sunny places—Morocco and the south of France. She was tall and thin, with hair as black as a raven that hit her back at an alluring spot. Her eyes were rimmed with kohl; her lips were a deep ruby red. My mother was just an eighteen-year-old shopgirl, but she had mastered the look of the jet set. She carried herself with confidence—even a slight arrogance—that men found irresistible. She was a prize, and she knew it.

My father, André, was ten years her senior. He was handsome and he knew it, the golden boy and oldest son of a farming family in Nîmes. He was born at the dawn of the Second World War. Like many in France, his family suffered greatly through the wars and he was determined to make a success of himself. He never wanted to feel hunger or deprivation again.

My father saw my mother standing by the bus stop wearing a miniskirt that showed off her long legs, and he was taken with her immediately. He was driving in his most prized possession, a red Peugeot convertible.

"Hello, beautiful," he said. "Where are you off to?"

My mother explained that she was going into town to meet a friend, to see a movie.

My father dismissed this suggestion out of hand. "You are going to sit in a dark room with a group of strangers on this gorgeous day? That's madness."

"What else do you have in mind?" my mother asked.

"Let's stroll the coast together," he said.

She gladly canceled her plans and he took her to Monaco.

My father was charming. My mother was daring. And that's how it all began.


My father was the pride of his family. He had worked his way through the ranks of the Banque Nationale de Paris, and had done so well that he was named president of the Cagnes-sur-Mer branch before his thirtieth birthday. He was married once, in his early twenties, to a girl from back home, but the marriage ended before they had children. He was single and well-off on the French Riviera, and my father enjoyed playing the role of a bad boy.

He took my mother to all of the most fabulous parties. The people they rubbed elbows with are like a who's who of France in the 1960s: Over there is the actor Alain Delon, famed for his recent turn as Ripley in Purple Noon, the French movie adaptation of the Patricia Highsmith novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. Here comes Brigitte Bardot, all blond hair and bosoms, talking animatedly about animal rights. Mingling with them are high-ranking government officials who have traveled to the south to take part in the fun and sun.

Françoise Sagan, the young novelist whose Bonjour Tristesse had been an international bestseller, was a frequent visitor to St. Tropez during those years. My parents would see her at parties. She grew up not far away in the region of Carjac, in the southwest of France. She was not much older than my mother, and she represented a new generation of women that my mother would be a part of, women who were lauded for their brains as well as their beauty.

On Sundays, my parents picnicked at the beach, and my father quickly discovered that my mother was a wonderful cook. It was not so much that she was domestically inclined (she had already informed him that she intended to continue to work after marriage and that she never wanted to be financially dependent on a man), but for my mother, cooking well was a matter of aesthetics, what she saw as an indication of good breeding and taste. She was the type of person who wanted everything to be just so, so she practiced and read books about cooking and perfected each recipe until she was proud.

A few months after their first meeting, my father proposed, and two years after they were married, I was born. My parents moved into a little house in St. Tropez. It was a stucco house with a garden out back and for a while, a different fairy tale took root. My father continued to succeed at work. As soon as I was old enough for daycare, my mother got a job at a boutique in St. Tropez. Although she was only in her early twenties, she was capable and by the time I was two years old, she was named directrice, manager of the store. They were happy with their careers and happy with each other, and for the first few years of my life, all was well.


My father was a peculiar mixture of traits. On the one hand, he was politically conservative, as one might expect of someone who had built his career in finance. When it came to his work, he was disciplined, focused, and unwavering. But at home, he was a different man. His whole life away from the bank was the opposite of everything the business world represented. At work, he was serious, traditional in dress and demeanor. At home, it was the future and the fringes that most interested him. He loved the circus. He loved technology, especially photography, and he was always taking pictures when I was a baby. By the time I was a toddler, he had upgraded from a simple Leica to an early version of a Super 8 motion picture camera. He loved sports, and every Saturday morning, we took off for the great outdoors. In the summer, it was the beach, where he taught me how to swim and snorkel and fish. In the winter, he hiked, climbing snowy mountains with athletic determination.

My father had a set routine in the morning: shower, shave, dress (he favored a dark suit and a light shirt, conservative but still sharp), eat breakfast, brush teeth, slap on aftershave, kiss son (that would be me), and go. As a chef, my brain holds a catalogue of scents, and the first, most powerful one is this: my father's aftershave, accompanied by the cool tingle and slight damp of his cheek as he wrapped me in his arms and kissed me goodbye before he left for work.

In the evening, when he returned, my father would change out of his suit into a plain T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops and go out back to work in his garden. Tending to the garden was one of his greatest pleasures. It was a way of transforming the stress of the day into something alive and growing. He often said, "I am proud to be a paysan," using the term for a simple country farmer, like his ancestors.

Though my mother's cooking ruled my childhood, my earliest food memories are not of eating her food. When I was very small, I ate from my father's garden: tomatoes and fennel in the late summer, steamed potato and eggplant in the fall, snap peas sautéed in butter and salt in the spring.

But the dish I remember most of all was not from any garden. Having read an article that said you can exponentially increase children's intelligence by feeding them brains, my mother tried night after night to get me to eat fricasseed lamb brains. And night after night, I perfected the art of throwing the brains across the room, using my teaspoon as a catapult.


My father had many interests, but none was as great as his passion for jazz. Nearly a million African Americans served in World War II, and jazz was the music they brought with them. While jazz had been popular as early as the 1920s, it was really in this period that the form of the music—innovative, revolutionary, a pastiche of history and culture—reflected the cultural moment so powerfully. All throughout Europe, jazz was the music of the Resistance and it symbolized hope, freedom, and a joy that felt precious and fleeting. As the German pianist Jutta Hipp once explained, "Americans won't be able to understand this, but to us, jazz is some kind of religion. We really had to fight for it and I remember nights when we didn't go down to the bomb shelter because we listened to [jazz] records. We just had the feeling that they were not our enemies and even though the bombs crashed around us…we felt safe."

My father came from a musical family. His father, Antonin, was just sixteen when he was called to serve in World War I. He rode a horse and played the trumpet for the cavalry, blasting out the short melodies that were the military's signals to their soldiers. The bugle calls were loud and soldiers relied on them to carry messages above the noise and confusion of the battlefield.

Antonin survived the war and married my grandmother Emilienne, who played the violin. They both loved music, opera especially, and it was a love that sustained them through some of France's toughest times. Antonin and Emilienne had five children, including my father, when World War II broke out and Antonin was called to play the trumpet for the army again.

France was very poor and the south of France was poorer still. When my grandfather returned to his home in Carpentras after the war, he found that he couldn't make a living from his farm anymore, so he moved the family to Nîmes, where he found a job as an accountant for a mining company. My father was the only child to pick up an instrument. He chose to play trumpet, just as his father did. My father went to university and all throughout his college years continued to study music at the conservatory.

In France at this time, a year of military service was mandatory. My father took his trumpet with him into service and it was there, as a soldier, that he fell in love with jazz. The music, which he heard on the radio and in the dance halls that the soldiers frequented on their furloughs, became the soundtrack to my parents' short, passionate marriage.

My mother loved to throw parties and my father was a natural-born entertainer, so they threw lots and lots of parties. When we were happy, our house was filled with music—Chet Baker on the turntable or my father, trumpet in hand, captivating a small crowd of friends with the words and rhythms of Louis Armstrong. We were a young French family—Maman, Papa, and myself—and our home was a salon. By the time I was four years old, our home had become the center of their social circle. There were parties every weekend and these are some of my earliest memories: happy people, my mother cooking, my father playing the trumpet, rooms that smelled of drink and smoke, long nights filled with music and laughter. Every night, just before the parties started to ramp up, my parents would slip away from the festivities to put me to bed. Mine was just a plain wooden cot, but I liked to pretend it was a rocket ship.

Later, when things were bad, and later still, when bad went to worse, food became my main source of comfort, my most consistent pleasure. But in the beginning, when I was too small to read or write, when I didn't know left from right or how to tie my own shoes, there was this: my mother, beaming at me with her eyes, bright and starry, and my father serenading me to sleep with Louis Armstrong on his horn.

I don't know when my father began to stray, but once he did, the affairs were frequent and egregious. My mother is always careful to tell me that she was "no angel either"—she too liked to flirt, and perhaps she took it even further with an affair or two of her own. But my father's assignations broke her down. "It's not that cheating changes the other person," she has explained to me. "Your father was still very much the same man he always was: smart, handsome, funny. It's how it changed me that I could not take."

I think I understand what she means, because I remember the shift. My mother, who was once all hugs and smiles, became pinched and closed off. Always a woman who liked to sing around the house, she replaced songs with screams and shouts. I rarely saw her in tears, but she always looked as if she'd just been crying. Her eyes would be red, her mascara would run, and the cat eyes she drew on with liner to elongate the almond shape of her eyes would look shaky, as if she'd drawn them with trembling hands. It was scary, the way I learned how people could change. I look back at it now and I want to say, "It was nothing. Relationships fall apart. Life is complicated. People get divorced." But it wasn't nothing. It wasn't nothing then, it isn't nothing now. I can still remember the terror of not being able to breathe as they argued, the way my lungs would contract as if a monster was sitting on my chest and wouldn't move: all of those nights when I was supposed to be sleeping, but I couldn't close my eyes for fear that the world as I knew it would end before I could open them again.

During this time, my father got a promotion and we moved from St. Tropez to a town on the coast called Les Sables d'Olonne. I have few happy memories of that place. The night that I understood, without a doubt, that my parents' marriage was ending, I was in my room, pretending to be asleep. My mother's voice rose to a scream while my father's stayed low, trying to keep her from losing control. It didn't work.

"Combien de temps…?" she shouted. "I knew…how dare you…" There was an edge to her voice, one I could only compare to the sound the dog down the street made when I poked a stick between the slats of the fence. And then the china began to crash. Terrified, I cracked open my door and peeked into the dining room.

My parents argued a lot, but this was different. It felt as though all of the bad feelings between them had finally exploded and everything was burning to the ground. There was no going back. My mother was unloading their wedding china from the vitrine and throwing it at the wall behind my father as he stood there, helpless. Even at five, I knew how proud my mother was of her porcelain. It was shocking to watch it come to such a violent end.

By now, I was standing in the hall. My father had seen me leaning against the wall in my pajamas and pleaded with my mother, whose back was to me: "Stop! You'll traumatize Eric!" he yelled. My mother launched a tureen at his head and then crumpled into tears.

My father guided me back into my room and tucked me in, holding me as I cried in confusion. "It's going to be fine," he repeated as he smoothed my hair. "Sometimes your mother gets upset." It felt like hours until I fell asleep.

The next morning, my father woke me up for breakfast.

"It's just the two of us," he said. "Your mother's not feeling well."

When I said that she seemed more angry than sick, he pinched my cheek and told me that one day I would learn more than I might ever want to know about women and their bad tempers.

He didn't mention what had happened the night before. Instead, he apologized for a few days before when he'd read me a book about a famous bullfighter. This was something upsetting that he could actually discuss. Growing up in Nîmes, a southern city with deep Roman and Spanish influences, my father had gone to bullfights in the ancient arena. He always talked about the day we'd see our first bullfight there. But a few pages into the book, I told him I would never go. Inside were pictures of men on horses lancing bulls with beribboned spears while the bulls gored the horses' sides, and then pictures of the bulls' corpses being dragged ceremoniously through the dust, trailing blood. The image was meant to be triumphant, but when I saw it, I started to cry. How could they be so unfair? How could you treat an animal with such cruelty?

My dad told me he couldn't imagine how such a mischievous kid could be so sensitive to other people's pain. "Next time you torture your babysitter to the point that she doesn't want to come back, I want you to remember what you're saying," he said, laughing.

He set our dishes in the sink, put on his suit jacket and tie, and left for the bank. I stood on the balcony and watched him get in his car. After he drove away, my mother came out and asked what I was doing.

It was summer, so I didn't have to go to school. Instead, I spent the day watching from the hallway as my mother silently packed a suitcase.

We didn't leave that night. Or the next. Instead, my parents performed fake-happy conversations at the dinner table for weeks on end. As sweet as they tried to be with me, I could still feel the seriousness and tension weighing down every word. I could see the pain in their eyes and hear the strain in their voices. During those meals, a heavy sadness filled the house, quiet and intense. My family was broken. So, when they called me into the living room and sat me down on the green velvet sofa, I was prepared.

My father fidgeted with a crystal paperweight on the Chinese coffee table, whose carved legs served as an off-road track for my model cars. "Your mother and I are going to try living apart for a while," he said.

I asked them what "a while" meant and they both laughed.

"It'll be good for you because you'll be able to travel," my mother said. She was wearing the smile she used when telling me that the doctor's needle was going to help me, so I should just relax. "You can spend time with me and with your father…."

"Until perhaps we get back together," he said, looking at my mother hopefully.

"Yes," she chimed in. "Until then. Perhaps. D'accord?"

My mother began to cry. Then my father too. This was the worst sign yet. I joined them.

Perhaps if they hadn't been so happy to begin with, the end would have been less heartbreaking. But it was like a part of each of us died in that apartment the day my mother and I moved out. My father, who was an expert at putting on a sunny appearance, did the best job of seeming unchanged. But in the years that followed my parents' divorce, I would come to see his loss, his grief. For my mother and I, the pain was more immediate and easier to see. My mother, who was so beautiful, became like a model who has smiled so many times, her smile is frozen, patently fake. Even when she seemed to be in a good mood, she showed a studied grin that did not match the faraway look in her eyes. As for me, I went from being a happy kid to a kind of pint-sized depressive. From the time I was five until I went away to cooking school and for many years after, I was rarely truly happy—just different degrees of sad.


It was late afternoon when my father drove my mother and me to our new home in St. Tropez, an investment property he owned there. He was dressed in his weekend casual: a polo shirt, a pair of khakis, leather loafers. It was as if we were all on our way to a country getaway, the way my father made cheerful conversation the whole drive. He rolled down the window and breathed in deeply. "Can you smell it?" he said. "The orange trees, the lemon trees? Look over there, a vineyard. Oh, it's Bandol. Provence makes the best rosé in the world, that's why the Provençal are so happy."

Every time my father turned around to talk to me on the drive to St. Tropez, which was often, he would take his eyes off the road and my mother would flinch, sucking in a gust of breath as if she half-expected the car to swerve at any moment and wrap around a tree.

He told me that he would write to me often and that he wanted me to write back—even if it was just a picture on a postcard. It was 1971, and no one used the phone to keep in touch. Phone calls were for short local conversations. My parents called each other on the aqua and white rotary phone to confirm meeting times and to give each other brief reminders, their sentences quick and precise.

In all the years of their marriage and all the years after, I was never summoned to the phone to speak to my mother or father, wasn't prompted to pick up the receiver and tell my grandmother that I loved her or tell my grandfather that I missed him, even though I did. My parents never called their parents on the phone unless there was an emergency. It was too expensive and even though they were young and successful, they came from modest means and they had modest ways.

My father swung around, one hand on the wheel, and tried to catch my eyes. He wanted me to know that he meant business. "Let me hear from you, Eric," he told me. "We must stay close. You are my only son, the last Ripert." Then he grinned. "I am the great Ripert, but you are the last. Just because we are not eating breakfast together and having dinner together all the time, it does not change anything. We must not let this distance become a wedge between us. We will write letters and when you come on vacation, we will have grand adventures, like Zorro."

I perked up at this: no one was better than my father at playing games of pretend.


When we arrived at the apartment building, I looked around, confused.

"Where is the house?" I asked.

"It is not a house," my mother said. "It's an apartment. You'll like it. The school is just down the street and the building is full of kids. Come, Eric, let's look."

She gave me her tight new smile, and I could tell that she was trying to sell the place to me, which was surprising. In France, parents do not cater to children. You can walk through a playground, a department store, or any bakery and you will hear a hundred times, "C'est moi qui décide." It is me who decides. French parents expect a sense of hierarchy and a respect from their children. You give them the answers and they accept them. But as we stood outside our new home, I could feel my mother softening, and because it was so uncharacteristic and her eyes were so sad, it seemed like she was not only giving in, but giving up.

My father leaned in to kiss her on both cheeks and she stiffened in his embrace. Then he bent down to embrace me. Grabbing me into his arms, he lifted me as if I were a plane and he spun me around in the air.

I jutted my arms forward and straightened my legs and announced, "I'm Batman!"

"Very good!" my father said. "Are you flying?"

"Yes," I said, as he moved me through the air. "I'm flying!"

When he put me down, I could see in his eyes, in the curve of his shoulders, and in the downturn of his lips that he was tired too. "Keep flying, Eric," he said, but his words felt hollow and halfhearted. Then he walked back to the car and as he put his key in the door, a puzzled look crossed his face, as if he were an amnesiac who wasn't sure where he had put his wife and son, as if he were a man who had misplaced his whole life.


At the door of the apartment building, two men stood smoking cigarettes, and they looked at my mother hungrily. She cut the ogling off with a single devastating "don't even think about it" glare.

I couldn't tell what she was thinking as she climbed the stairs to our new second-floor flat. She seemed at sea, like one of those teenage girls in a French New Wave movie. They were beautiful, these girls, and I liked to look at their pictures on the big posters outside of the cinema in town. But they also looked spacey and unsure, as if they themselves had no idea how the movie might end.

My mother had always looked older than her age, but on this night, she looked very young. Instead of her usual impeccably coiffed waves, her hair was pulled back into a simple ponytail, and her face was scrubbed free of makeup.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one who thought my mother looked like a teenager, because as she stood at the landing of the second floor, the door to a nearby apartment flew open and a woman called out, "Giselle, I hear you on the steps! I told you, no going out on a school night!"

When my mother turned to look at her, the woman said, "Excuse me, I'm sorry, mademoiselle." Then, upon seeing me, "I mean, madame." The woman had changed her tone, not wanting to insult my mom by suggesting that she was an unwed mother.

But it was exactly onto this precipice that my mother had fallen. Too young to be a madame, but too much the divorcée to be a mademoiselle. She had been the first of her friends to be married and now was the first to get divorced. She was twenty-six years old.


We spent just a few months in that studio apartment in St. Tropez. Then my mother got the opportunity to open her own boutique, so we moved to a small town called Revel. We moved into the guesthouse of a farm, which I liked much better than the noisy apartment building, and because she was new in town, there was no babysitter. My mother kept me close under her wing. We came home for dinner and to sleep, but we spent our afternoons and weekends at my mother's boutique.

My mother, who had a discerning eye for fashion and a knack for putting even affordable clothes together, was quickly a success in Revel as the local women clamored to see what she brought back from her shopping trips to Paris. It was, I think, some small consolation to my mother. Her marriage may have failed, but she had not failed at her goal of financial independence. My mother took me with her on trips to Paris, and she made sure that I was well dressed and well groomed when I went to visit my father every five or six weeks. Even at that age, I knew how I appeared—the only child of two well-off parents, shuttled back and forth in first-class train cars, eating meals at Michelin-starred restaurants. I was, my cousins joked, a little prince. But in the novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the little prince is not notable because he has noble blood. The entire throughline of the story is that he is lonely, and inhabits a "mysterious place, the land of tears."

When I began first grade in Revel, I made a game of getting through the entire school day without saying a word. I shrugged when the teachers asked me questions, shook my head "no" when the other kids invited me to play at recess. After school, I stayed in the back of my mother's boutique until she could drive us home to the little farmhouse. It was there that I released the energy that had been pent up all day. I bounced off the walls of the storeroom while I was supposed to be doing my homework and refused to write letters to my father like I was repeatedly asked.

My mother had a hard time getting me to talk to or be affectionate with her. I blamed her for my parents' breakup. It was she, after all, who had broken the wedding china, and who did all the yelling and screaming. When I was feeling mean, I would ask her, "Why did you send my father away?" and watch as tears welled up. She would look at me as if I'd punched her, and the pained look on her face gave me a kind of satisfaction. I studied her grimaces the same way I looked on as insects squirmed when I took them apart, wing by wing.

After my parents' divorce, the only time I felt close to my mother was in the kitchen. From the second she put on her apron, I followed her every move. My anger disappeared and I was finally able to calm down and focus as I watched her in that tiny room, making meals that I could tell were intended to make me happy. I was so entranced that I'd even answer her questions about what I'd done in school. I listened closely as she told me stories about her childhood in Morocco, how she learned to cook French dishes from her mother, and the cookbooks by great chefs that she bought as soon as she started earning her own money. My mother was never more expressive of her love than when she was in the kitchen. She was reserved by nature, and while she hugged and kissed me plenty, she was never one to smother me with physical affection. But she made it clear that everything she prepared in the kitchen was done with the hopes of pleasing me. She reminded me that I'd always loved to eat: "When you were a baby," she'd tell me, "you drank so much formula that we had to go to the doctor to make sure you were normal. Even he was surprised!" Sitting on my chair in that tiny farm kitchen felt intimate and special. That room was sacred.

Although I wasn't allowed to help with the meal proper, my mother gave me little things to do. She let me flick on the light of the oven to see how her cake was rising. She gave me balls of dough to shape into deformed loaves of "bread." I was fascinated by the act of cooking—how sugar, butter, apples, and dough magically transformed into a richly burnished tarte tatin. (Flipping it from hot skillet to plate was another favorite magic trick.) I loved the craftsmanship—how my mother artfully folded thin pieces of rice paper around ground pork, crab, and vegetables to create delicate, transparent spring rolls, which the French called nem. When I'd ask why she put them in a cold sauté pan filled with oil before turning on the heat, she'd explain that it made them crisper and fully cooked inside. Later, as my teeth shattered the golden rice-paper wrapper, I'd ask her to explain it again so I could make them myself one day. I loved the constant motion of cooking the way some kids loved sports. She spent hours assembling her couscous, starting with the mise en place. Next, she began her lamb tagine, flavored with the peel of lemons that she buried in a jar of salt until they became moist and candy-like. While the tagine simmered in its cone-topped earthen pot, she rolled damp semolina between her palms until fine, fluffy blond grains of couscous showered into the bowl, ready to be steamed. I was fixated on whatever it was her hands were doing as she spoke, the slow, intricate dance that always ended deliciously. It was an incredible show.

In the dining room, she taught me to set the table with ironed napkins and good china and silver, even for just the two of us. It didn't occur to me until I began working in restaurants myself years later that she was educating me in what she called l'art de la table, teaching me the importance of elegant presentation because she believed that it made the food taste even better. To her, the entire meal was a creative act, an expression of refinement and taste. There were always flowers, candles, and a starched tablecloth, whether we were eating crab soufflé or onglet and frites. We even changed plates between courses like they did in restaurants. I grew up thinking that everyone ate this way.

Besides spoiling me at the table, my mother also indulged my appetite at the supermarket. I'd tell her exactly which jambon de Paris and yogurt I wanted from the shelves. I was extremely picky about my favorite variety of Petit Suisse cheese, not to mention the brand of mini-toasts that I had for breakfast, along with the butter and jam. She usually rushed me past the cookie aisle, but I didn't mind; there was always something better to eat at home. For me, watching her make pastry was pure magic—and then, of course, there was the pastry itself. But once the dishes had been washed and the tarte tatin put away for tomorrow's snack, my anger at my mother and my hunger for my father returned.

After a reasonable mourning period, my mother began to date, and it wasn't long before it seemed like she was dating all the time. The babysitters who now sometimes watched me after school until my mother closed the shop were staying long after I'd gone to bed.

The men my mother dated took no interest in me, nor I in them. One guy was always slurring and stumbling, a glass in his hand. Another I saw from my spying station upstairs; he cornered my mom in the hallway and grabbed her by the neck until she screamed and wrestled herself free and kicked him out of our apartment. And while I would have liked to spend more time with the famous rugby player she dated for a few months, the truth is that I didn't mind being sent to stay with my grandfather and grandmother—his second wife, Maguy—for long weekends and short vacations.

On the rare days my mom didn't have a date, I would head to the boutique after school and wait, bored out of my mind, until she could drive us home. One day when I arrived at my mother's boutique, there was a man at the counter, showing her pictures of clothes in a big binder.

"Eric, this is Hugo," she said, patting her hair. "He's a distributor for a sportswear company."

Hugo shook my hand, even though I was only six. He looked like Charles Bronson, pre-mustache.

"Your mother says you're a real gourmand," he said.

"That's because she's the best cook in Revel!"

Hugo was there after school another time, and then another, usually with something for me from the bakery in his town. He definitely came across as a bad boy, and with his pomaded hair and louche demeanor, the Charles Bronson resemblance didn't seem like a coincidence. He talked admiringly about gangster movies and I could tell that he tried to cultivate the air of a tough guy.

He invited us out one Sunday for a picnic in the countryside and picked us up in his Mercedes. I had been expecting sandwiches, but he unpacked a tablecloth and set it with real plates, glasses, and silverware. My mother was impressed, and I was happy that she was happy. Over roast pork loin, he explained socialism to me in a way that made sense. I told him how I used to argue with my teachers about the Vietnam War, and Hugo told me that the Vietnamese were fighting for communism, which was kind of like socialism, so it sounded good to me.

After we were finished with lunch, Hugo patiently tried to teach me to fish using leftover baguette. He wasn't my dad—no one, to my mind, was as cool as my dad. But at least he was making an effort.

When he dropped us off, he asked if he could take us mushroom hunting the next weekend. I could see from my mother's expression that she wanted not just a boyfriend, but someone who would be a kind of father figure to me. I silently vowed to give Hugo a chance.

The mushroom hunt was followed by a quail hunt. I was excited to be out in the forest, but I was still just a kid. I didn't know how to follow Hugo silently and he yelled at me for making noise, scaring the birds away. It doesn't take long for a child to figure out how quickly the switch in an adult can flip. When you are small and nothing in the world is truly your choice, you learn to read the adults around you so that you can get what you want: their praise, their affection, their love. I began to see that with Hugo there was very little room for error on my part.

We all shared a love of fine food, and Hugo took my mother and me to the best restaurants in the region. By the time I was in first grade, I was already fond of cheese soufflé, filet en croute, foie gras, sole meunière, and stinky cheeses. By the end of the year, the three of us were living in an apartment above the store. My mother was happy for the first time in years, but my impression of Hugo had dimmed.

On Sunday, her one day off, my mom would stay in the bedroom with Hugo until lunchtime, at which point he would come out, knot his foulard, and march me in the direction of the local movie theater, about a mile away. It didn't matter if what was playing was appropriate for children; I was dropped at the curb and left to see Hugo-approved films like The Godfather and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, which give me nightmares to this day.

My mother's business began to boom, which was fortunate because it turned out that Hugo was not the high roller he pretended to be. I could sense my mother's disappointment. She'd married a successful man, but he was unfaithful. She now had a faithful man, but he wasn't successful. She poured her energy into being successful enough for the both of them. Soon, she was able to open a second boutique in the nearby town of Castelnaudary, where I started at a new school.

I had grown jealous of Hugo, and I could tell he was jealous of me too. Now that he'd gotten what he wanted, a different side of him began to emerge. When we went hunting, he'd yell at me in front of my mother, telling me that my clumsiness was scaring away the animals. He'd say I'd never be a good fisherman, or that I was so dumb I couldn't find a wild mushroom if it was glued to my nose.

One weekend, we went into the mountains to go skiing. It was my first time on skis and I kept falling in the snow. Hugo would stand over me, laughing and saying, "You fall so often. Learning how to get up will be your most important skill." Each time, my mother, laughing along with him, reached out with her pole and helped me to my feet. But I began to wonder, what happens when my mother isn't there to pick me up?

When she praised my schoolwork, he criticized it. When she told me I was handsome, he'd say, "Maybe, but you should close your mouth. You look like a mongoloid." (His nickname for me was gagotte, which is a horrible French slur used to describe the mentally disabled.)

The only time Hugo and I were civil was at the dinner table.

Please pass the bread.

Yes, thank you!

This blanquette de veau is perfect, Monique.

It was a temporary truce, my mother's ironed linen napkins our white flag.


In St. Tropez, before my parents' divorce, my father had worked as the head of the bank in town. The town was crazy in the summer, rife with tourists and yachts full of partying celebrities, but in the winter, it felt more like a small village, where the residents could really mingle and get to know each other. Marcel Pagnol was a customer at my father's bank; over the years the two became quite friendly, and the friendship meant a great deal to my father. Pagnol was a legend in his own time: a novelist, a playwright, and a filmmaker, he was like John Updike, Tennessee Williams, and Woody Allen all rolled into one. He was the first French filmmaker to be elected to L'Académie Française. Founded in 1653 by the chief minister to King Louis XIII, L'Académie consists of just forty members who are known as immortels: the immortals. These forty men (back then, they were all men) rule on all matters of the French language, and it is their grave responsibility to guide and shape the evolution of the written and spoken word. Marcel Pagnol's membership in this academy was the equivalent of being knighted by the queen of England.

Pagnol quite liked my father, and he gifted him with an autographed copy of his most famous book, La Gloire de Mon Père, or The Glory of My Father. Although Pagnol was revered across the country as a cultural genius, in the south where he was born and eventually retired, he was known as the hero of the paysan, the working man. This was especially meaningful to my father, who prided himself on his humble background. My father cherished his autographed book and he would show it off to anyone who came over. Sometimes he took it to work to show it off to a client.

After the divorce, when my mother packed up our things, she got her revenge. She hid the book in a box and took it to our new home. The night my father realized the book was missing, I witnessed a rare display of fury from him. I could hear him screaming at my mother through the phone, but she refused to return it.

The Pagnol book was a trophy and my mother displayed it on the bookshelf with her favorite novels. Sometimes, I took it to school to show my teachers. Just having it in my backpack gave me a kind of courage.

At night was when I missed my father the most. I missed our ritual of stories and the tenderness of him tucking me in. On those nights when the ache of not having him in the house was the worst, I tucked the Pagnol book under my pillow, just to have some part of him next to me.

After a few months of living with Hugo, I began to feel like my mother had chosen her boyfriend over me and that she, like him, was merely tolerating my presence. To get back at her, the next time I went to see my dad, I took the Marcel Pagnol book from its place of honor and hid it in my suitcase.

I was so proud to have returned the beloved object to my father, who was happy I'd thought of him. (He must have known I'd stolen it from my mother, but he didn't let on.) But about a week into my visit, my mother called. She and my father got into a vicious argument about the book, with her using all of her diplomatic resources to get it back. Finally, she told him that if I didn't bring the book with me, I wouldn't be allowed home.

As I was packing for the drive back, my father handed me the Pagnol.

"I love this book, but apparently so does your mother; please take it back to her," he said.

I nodded, ashamed and embarrassed that my gift had been returned.

My father held me close. "It was lovely to see it again. Thank you, Eric. I'm counting on you to look after it for me."

I nodded and said that I would.

My father drove me to my mother's boutique and told me to wait in the car while he went in for what he knew would be a tongue lashing. After he left, it was my turn.

"I'm glad you've learned how to steal, Eric," my mother said when I got in. "I'm only going to warn you once: if you do that again, you won't live with me anymore. I must be able to trust you."

It was a funny word, trust. I loved my parents. With all of their shortcomings, I loved them both mightily. But if you asked me whom I trusted, I could not tell you. I wasn't sure I knew what that word meant.


It was not long before things began to sour between my mother and Hugo. He liked the flash life, but he didn't have the means to take care of my mother the way he did when they were first dating. That money—begged, borrowed, or stolen—was gone. Hugo's job disappeared too, so my mother took him on at her boutique. From their evening arguments, I could tell that Hugo wasn't the help to my mother's business that she hoped he might be.

At night, after she kissed me good night, my mother was careful to put on the record player, but I could still hear their heated conversations:

"Hugo, you are supposed to sell the clothes, not yourself."

"I am only flirting to flatter, my dearest," Hugo cooed. "Flattery encourages the customers to buy." It was his attempt at being seductive, and even just listening to him be so smarmy made me want to throw up.

My mother, I know, was sipping from a cup of tea. She had made herself a pot of verveine (lemon verbena) to calm her nerves; I could smell it steeping.

"Flatter the clothes, not the women," my mother sighed. "You say, 'Wow, you look beautiful in that dress,' or 'That is the height of sophistication, what's the occasion?' "

My mother had already left one man for cheating. She did not want to leave another. But more important, she had built her business herself, from the ground up. She was strong enough to deal with Hugo's flirting if it was harmless, but she would not abide his lack of work and how it was hurting our family income.

Their relationship shifted, and my mother no longer sent me to the movies on Sunday afternoon. She did not seem to have any interest in spending time alone with Hugo at all. So when she was not around, which was roughly Monday through Friday, from 3 P.M. until 8:30 or 9 P.M. and all day on Saturday—the boutique's busiest day—Hugo and I were left alone.

It was a war, and there were rules. When I came home from school, Hugo would make a polite attempt at conversation, such as, "Bonjour, Eric. How was school today?"

Depending on my mood, I would answer under my breath either "Bon"—fine—or "Why do you care?"

No matter what I said, as the grown-up, he could accuse me of being rude in my response. An unsatisfactory answer was a big enough offense that Hugo could pick a fight with me, though he had to be careful in his attacks: my mother's rule was that Hugo couldn't physically discipline me. Since he wasn't allowed to beat me, he sought subtle ways to push me around and make sure that I knew who was boss.

"You little brat," he often began. "I am the man in the house and you need to show me some respect."

Respect was the name of the game and a lack of respect was cause for him to get aggressive: nothing too overt, just a shove, a push, a pinch.

On my way into the kitchen, I sometimes threw my book bag on the sofa instead of putting it away in my room, which was enough cause for Hugo to open my bag and start throwing my books around, telling me to "shape up and stop being such a freaking slob." He would throw a tantrum over the mess and claim to be doing it as an advocate of my mother. "Your mother works so hard, Eric! When she comes home, she doesn't have the time or the energy to clean up after you. Show her some goddamn respect and put away your shit."

He could, if he chose—and it was all his choice—put his hand on my shoulder and push me into the wall like the bigger kids did at school, quick and rough before the teachers could catch them. "You go to school to learn, you little bum," he might say, pounding me with a book. "Did you learn anything today or did you do the teaching? Lessons in how to be a disrespectful little beast, perhaps?"

When Hugo wanted to drag the action out longer, he would ignore the book bag, and let me go into the kitchen to prepare my afternoon snack.

In France, le goûter is an important part of daily life. It might be a crêpe with caramel sauce or a baguette with a piece of chocolate smeared on it, Nutella-style. It could be a tartine with chèvre frais and olives or with raspberries and cream cheese.

I loved food, and so my goûter was as precious to me as cellphones are to kids today. I dreamed about my goûter. I spent most of Sunday thinking about my goûter for the week. My mother shopped for me especially so that I might have everything that I needed to tide me over until dinner.

But I was also a bit of a glutton and chances were good that unsupervised by my mother, I would eat much more than a snack. This was another opportunity for Hugo to reprimand me. So he watched me as I assembled the ingredients of what I would eat that day. I reached for the baguette, the butter, the Nutella, the raspberries. There was a knife, a plate, a napkin.

If he was in a good mood, Hugo would watch me assemble my snack and be sated by the fact that as I spread Nutella on the bread, I was visibly agitated. By this point I was usually ready to enter the fight. I wanted an excuse to tell him off, to speak disrespectfully, to tell him what I really thought of him.

If he was in a slightly less favorable mood, he had many ways he could toy with me, such as knocking the bread off the plate, then demanding that I pick it up. "Stop being so clumsy, Eric." Or, if there was jam out, he would pour it out on the floor, telling me to clean up the mess—this was a favorite tactic.

No matter what I did, I was vulnerable, and Hugo liked it that way. I was only seven and it would take me a long time—years—to gain the height and the courage to stand my ground and dare to fight back.

Hugo was patient in his cruelty. He trained me to mistrust him and even hate him, the way one might train a dog to fight. I learned to heel to his commands, and my senses developed so that soon I could read the signs and respond to the danger at hand.

What was harder to learn, what would take decades and putting an ocean between me and the man who dared to call himself my second father, was how to manage the anger. It just grew and grew inside of me. It became one of my coldest comforts: imagining all of the ways in which I would get back at Hugo and anyone else who dared to test me when I was bigger and stronger, away from my mother's house and free to defend myself.

Although my mother never asked me what was going on with Hugo, she noticed that I was changing. I was increasingly isolated at school, while at home I was more aggressive. The only way that I could tell she was sorry for all of the changes in our lives was through her food. Cooking gave her emotions a place to go.

As soon as I woke up, I went to the kitchen, where she had begun preparing dinner before she left for work. She indulged my increasingly specific requests—roasted capon with black olives, leg of lamb English-style, roast pork with mustard—and spoiled me with elaborate recipes from the nouvelle cuisine cookbooks on her bedside table.

The trips that we planned to restaurants became more elaborate too. In the beginning, she and Hugo sought out the best restaurants in the village, then the region. Soon, we were driving hours to Michelin-starred destinations like Café de la Paix, La Baumanière, Negresco, and Michel Guèrard. I had my special restaurant suit, and spent weeks looking forward to the afternoons when I'd be presented with the chariot de dessert, the old-fashioned dessert cart, and allowed to choose as many pastries as I wanted.

There was always excitement around the trip—choosing the restaurants from the guides (Michelin or Gault et Millau), and taking recommendations from friends. My mother, Hugo, and I would talk about it for weeks before. My mother would clip articles about great chefs and restaurants for me to read alongside the cookbooks that I devoured before bed. For me, the biggest thrills at these restaurants, besides the food, were the ritual and the formality. The white tablecloths were always starched and set with precision. Water was never dumped into a glass; it was poured with a certain style. When Hugo ordered wine, they brought out special glasses and decanted the bottle just so. Duck was carved tableside, crèpes were flambéed before our eyes. It was a magnificent performance and I relished every second of it.

The waiters were always respectful to me. Even though I was wide-eyed and impressed by their every gesture, they could tell that I was knowledgeable about food. I'd read from my own menu and say, "I'm going to try the rack of lamb stuffed with truffles, please." No one ever offered me anything akin to a kid's menu; I'm not sure such a thing even existed in France back then.

The biggest revelation occurred at Negresco, a decadent restaurant in Nice. The chef, Jacques Maximin, used the southern ingredients that I loved and really knew how to enhance their flavors, like a stuffed zucchini flower nappéd with a truffle sauce that had me begging for more, or a chiboust aux fraises des bois, a light-as-air cream pastry studded with fresh wild strawberries. After the meal, I announced to my proud mother that I'd never tasted anything so good in my life.

"The little prince has royal tastes," Hugo grumbled. But I didn't care. A great meal was always the best medicine for the wound that he was in my life.


Hugo occasionally helped out around the house and at my mother's stores, but what he really excelled at was spending her money and bossing me around. When my mother got pregnant, his bullying only intensified. With my mother in a more delicate condition, I had to fend for myself. She made sure that he bought the jambon de Paris and cakes and yogurts that I loved for my after-school snack, but Hugo would hide them from me. I could never convince her that I couldn't find them in the fridge.

While my mother was pregnant, she found out that Hugo had been cheating on her, and she kicked him out with a fury I'd never seen.

The next night, he returned and pleaded with her to take him back, saying he couldn't live without her, he'd never do it again, he just couldn't bear her being confined to bed without being able to touch her, and so on and so forth. She yelled at him to get out, that he was a lowlife, a sponge, and, to top it off, a lousy lover. Before I knew what was happening, he grabbed a pair of manicure scissors and slit his wrists right in front of us.

"You have to keep him, Maman," I pleaded, traumatized, as his blood spurted into the bathroom sink and all over the floor.

I had never seen anything like it. There was so much blood, I was certain that if I didn't act quickly, Hugo would die. I thought I hated him, but I didn't want to watch him die.

"Look what you've done!" I yelled at my mother. "What will happen to the baby? Who will look after me while you work? You can't just kick him out in the street."

Just like Hugo, I was crying and begging her to take mercy on him for the sake of the "family."

"You want him to stay?" my mother asked, incredulous.

"Yes," I insisted.

"Then he can stay," my mother said, her face drained and exhausted. Then she turned around and went back to bed.

And so I saved him. Later on, my mother told me that the bastard had known exactly how to cut himself without slicing an artery. I could hardly believe it: it had all been a show.

Soon after Hugo's "suicide attempt," my little sister, Marika, was born. Then, one weekend when I was away visiting my father, my mother and Hugo got married and his place in our home was cemented. Hugo used Marika as a wedge to try and drive me out of the family. "Now," he would remind me, "you are the bastard in the house." He humiliated me whenever he could, insulting me in front of other people. When we were home alone, it became increasingly physical. I began to fight him as hard as I could, knowing that even if he was bigger than I was, I could outsmart him and push him to his limit. What I didn't realize was that I was the one on the edge.


"Eric, clear the dishes," Hugo barked one night after I'd finished the last of the millefeuille à la vanille.

"Absolutely not."

"No TV then," he said.

"Bullshit!" I yelled.

I calmly went to my room and locked the door. He banged on it for what must have been twenty minutes. My mother tried for ten more, telling me to grow up and open the door. But I wouldn't give in. Instead I started writing notes and folding them into elaborate little envelopes I made using my art paper from class.

"Je vous dis merde!" read the first.

"You're all assholes!" said another.

"Go fuck yourselves!" was my final shot.

I knew that there would be hell to pay when I finally opened the door. My mother would get the belt, in an attempt to discipline me, but that only made me want to challenge her more. If I was going to be beaten, I was going to make sure they knew exactly how I felt about them before the first blow. Go fuck yourselves. I couldn't say the words. I couldn't fight back physically. But scribbling the curses, whispering them as I wrote, a feeling of pride bloomed in my chest. I wasn't just taking it—I was standing up for myself, on paper, if nowhere else. You're all assholes!

The pounding on the door intensified and Marika cried louder. My mother threatened everything she could think of, from a ban on desserts to no more visits to my father, but I wouldn't turn the lock. After they gave up and went to bed, I blasted my clock radio and sang Michel Sardou and Johnny Hallyday at the top of my lungs until it was almost lights out.

The immediate backlash wasn't that bad, but one night a few weeks later, my mother told me that she wanted me to "get a better education." She handed me a brochure showing kids my age wearing military uniforms in front of a château.

"But I always get very good grades!" I protested.

"It's the best school. You can learn horseback riding. You get to wear a beautiful uniform. You'll even have your own room!" She made it sound like Club Med. Finally, she arrived at the real reason: "You have to learn discipline and respect. We can't control you anymore."

I didn't understand who this "we" was. She was the one in charge of discipline; Hugo wasn't allowed to touch me (at least not in front of her), but by that point I had become desensitized to her punishment. She would hit me with a belt, and I'd just laugh and say, "What are you doing? I can't feel anything." Or, "Ha-ha! That tickles!" She would get so furious she'd go to her room and cry.

"I'll go live with my father then," I said. "He wants me to be with him." I wasn't sure about this, but in that moment I needed him to rescue me.

"He's married to Francine now, Eric, and you know she doesn't want you around," was her reply. "The last time you came back from their house, she didn't even bother to fold your clothes before shoving them in your suitcase. Besides, you don't want to have to eat her food every day, do you? This is for the best. Anyway, you don't have a choice. You're already enrolled. Classes start after New Year's."

"But the school year has just started! I can behave, I promise." It was suddenly clear how desperately serious the situation had become.

My mother glared at me. "Maybe you should have thought about that when you were making our lives so impossible."

I called my father in the hopes that he might save me from this fate. I don't know what I expected him to say, but I didn't expect him to ship me off without trying, like my mother had.

"I'm sorry, Eric, but I can't take you," he said, apologetic but firm. "Your mother says you need discipline and values, and this is the only way you'll learn. She doesn't know how to control you anymore. I'll see you in the summer. Maybe you can come to visit one weekend."

Eight years old, I thought, and thrown away.

My mother and Hugo put my suitcase in the trunk of their new car, strapped Marika in, and drove us two and a half hours to Perpignan, a small city on the southernmost tip of France. Boys were running between arches in the courtyard of a building that looked about fifty thousand years old, and they weren't wearing fancy uniforms: this wasn't the military academy I'd seen in the brochure. My mother hadn't been able to get me enrolled at the academy after all, so she was sending me to Saint Louis de Gonzague, a Catholic school with the reputation for having, as my mom put it, "the best education."

"All of the foreign presidents and diplomats send their sons here," she said with pride, as though this could possibly matter to me.

Only a heartless woman would send her eight-year-old away to school, I thought, with the kind of venom I usually reserved for Hugo.

The second-floor dormitory with its spare, military barrack–style bunk beds gave a hint of the grim school year ahead of me. My mother was suddenly emotional and I could see in her face that she knew she had made a mistake. When she moved to hug me goodbye, I turned away from her embrace. She leaned in to kiss my cheek and I turned away from that too. My mother winced, as if the gesture physically hurt; then she put on her "it's for the best, chéri" smile.

Hugo gave me a victorious pat, and that was it. They drove off with Marika sleeping in the backseat. I refused to even raise my hand and wave.

There were no private rooms at Saint Louis de Gonzague, just a drafty dormitory where forty boys slept in narrow iron beds, shared a single shower, and pissed in a trough. At this point in my (short) life, I was used to abrupt transitions and having to start over in a new place. But the first night in my tiny bed, I felt as if loneliness had tied itself around my ankle like an anchor with a knot that I would never untangle. I tried to pretend that it was summer and I was in my grandfather's apricot tree at their house in Cagnes-sur-Mer, missing home but enjoying my independence. But the cold, hard bunk was no substitute for the tree that was my summertime friend.

When class began, it was clear that I was far ahead in my lessons, so I decided it wasn't worth it to pay attention to the lady with the gray chignon at the front of the class. During the afternoon study period, there was nothing for me to study, so I read comic books. Finally, someone noticed: after six weeks or so, the school asked for my mother's permission to advance me from second to third grade. She said yes without asking me, proud to be the parent of a genius.


Suddenly I was dropped into a new group of boys who knew things I didn't, such as the basics of math and grammar. (And in France, if you don't know grammar, you're finished.) My new teacher couldn't be bothered to bring me up to speed, never mind take the time to answer my questions about politics and current events. In a single week, I went from being far ahead of my classmates to barely keeping up to falling behind.

I spent more and more time in the courtyard, halfheartedly playing with different groups of boys, because study hall had become torturous: I knew that I couldn't catch up to my new classmates. There was none of the usual comfort that I found in the food. It was cheap and disgusting, overcooked rice with raw garlic being a staple. I'd never known truly bad food before, and the comedown was dramatic.

On the occasional longed-for weekend when someone would come get me, I'd spend Saturday alone with Hugo and Marika while my mother worked; on a Sunday we might go on an outing—a picnic or fishing—before I was driven back to school, where no comforts or friends awaited me. My aunt Janine occasionally brought me back to Montpellier. My father never did invite me to visit.

My grades started to slip, then fail. During recess and study hall, where I spent most of my time, the man I'll call Père Damien, the former priest in charge of us during those hours, began paying more attention to me. In the early 1970s, a priest who had been forced to resign was considered défroqué—defrocked. You were shamed, but not fired, because the Church was very protective of itself and its own. Instead, defrocked priests were simply moved to another post. I would soon learn why Père Damien had lost his collar.

He must've seen how disengaged I'd become from the other boys, so he would often talk to me, staying with me after the other kids had gone back to the dorm. Once I'd told him all about how my mother and Hugo had conspired to send me away and wouldn't even come get me on weekends, he said that he would ask my mother's permission to take me around town when I wasn't back home. She happily arranged to pay him for these outings, which I looked forward to all week.

I'd always wanted an older brother, and Père Damien, with his American-style clothes and friendly manner, seemed to fit the bill. We'd walk into town to see a movie, or go to a flea market and look at old books and toys. We talked about grown-up things, mainly about my parents and their divorce, and how much I hated school. I also got to ask him the questions I had about religion. I was puzzled by Catholic rituals (my aunt Monique took me to mass in Nîmes, but I was only interested in how to get the cookie that they served at the end) and suspicious about origin stories like Adam and Eve. Though mysterious, Père Damien was warm and kind and always asked the right questions. He soon got me to open up. I felt like there was at least one person in Perpignan who understood me.

Sometimes he'd take me along as he ran errands to the stationery shop or the local market. On Saturdays, there was a flea market adjacent to the school and I began to accompany him as he shopped and talked to the merchants. A few weeks into our friendship, he took me to a part of town I'd never visited before. He told me to wait in the street for a few minutes while he ran an errand. I watched him go into a store with neon silhouettes and racy photos of curvy women on the curtained window. When he returned to my side five minutes later, he took my hand and walked me back to school.

The following weekend, after we'd gone to the Saturday flea market, Père Damien invited me to his room to watch TV. He hung his overcoat on the back of the door. Underneath he was wearing a cardigan and old work pants, which reminded me of my grandfather. There was barely space in his room for his monk-size bed. In order to watch the tiny set propped on his desk, we had to sit side by side on Père Damien's bed.

A few minutes into the show, he turned down the volume. "How do you do it with your mom and dad?" he asked me.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, when they give you kisses and caresses."

I froze. "They don't give me kisses and caresses."

"Sure they do." He practically purred the words and I could feel a wave of panic washing over me.

"They really don't," I insisted.

Père Damien turned the volume back up, but he moved closer to me. During a commercial, he began stroking my arm. I stared at the set, pretending to be interested in the shampoo the woman was advertising. He leaned over to kiss my neck, his long hair falling around his face and onto my stomach.

"My dad doesn't do that," I said, pushing him away.

"Oh, but you know he would love to give you affection. I know for a fact that he'd love to do that to you. Let me show you…."

"No!" I was uncomfortable, and suddenly angry that Père Damien would try to take my father's place, or even pretend to know what he was like. "You're not my dad, and I don't want you to do that. Leave me alone. I want to get out of here."

I got up and left, shutting the door. I was so scared that he would run after me. In my stomach I could sense that something wrong had just happened, and there was only one person who could help prevent it from happening again. I hurried to the phone booth to call my mother, looking over my shoulder to make sure he wasn't coming. I was terrified by what he would do if he caught me. Within moments, my only friend had become my enemy.

"What's going on?" my mother asked, sounding surprised to hear from me. It was dinnertime back home, and I could hear Marika crying in the background.

"We were watching TV and he said he wanted to give me affection like Dad and he started to kiss—"

"Who's 'we'?" she asked, sounding simultaneously concerned and annoyed.

"Père Damien," I whispered into the receiver. There were other boys around, and I didn't want them to hear what I was telling my mother. "He's acting weird."

I could hear the sharp intake of her breath and could picture the mixture of anger and aggression on her face. There was nothing quite like my mother in mama-bear mode. I knew that Père Damien was going to lose a limb, or his job, or both.

"I will call you back," my mother said. "Go to your dorm and don't talk to anyone."

"I don't want to be here anymore, Mom," I said, my toughness temporarily failing me. "I want to come home."

I forced myself to go to dinner, sitting away from the other boys. I was disturbed in a way I couldn't put into words. I slept that night with a kind of fear that I had never known. After all of the bad things I had seen and felt in my life so far, it was a terrible feeling to realize that there were even more horrible things out there, waiting to make themselves known. But not knowing what they were yet meant that I could not prepare myself, and the mixture of fear and helplessness was crippling.

The next day, one of the teachers found me in the courtyard and led me down the hallway to wait for my mother, who was in the head priest's office.

When she came out, her dark eyes shining, she said, "It's not going to happen again. And we'll get you out of here."

"Should I pack?"

Her eyes softened for a moment. "You can't come home until the end of the year," she said. "You have to finish the semester. I'm so sorry, my love." She held me for a minute, then pulled away, saying she had a long drive home.

The next day in study hall, I was terrified at the prospect of facing him again. I halfheartedly goofed around with the kid next to me to try to cover up my fear. Suddenly, Père Damien banged on my old hinge-top desk so hard it rattled the pencils and rulers inside.

"Get to work, Ripert!" he yelled. "Maybe if you studied harder you'd have better grades."

The other boys laughed, and I dove into my homework, furious and confused.

After everyone had left, I told myself to be brave, even though I was shaking, and I went up to Père Damien to ask him why he was picking on me.

"I can't believe you said all that to your mother!" he hissed. "You know I'm not allowed to talk to you again."

"I thought you were my friend," I said.

"Never," he spat. "You spoiled rich kids are all the same. Tell your mother to buy you a new friend."

For the rest of the year, whenever I saw Père Damien alone with other kids, my stomach tightened with fear, sensing that he might try to kiss them in his little room too. What he had done was wrong, but apparently it wasn't wrong enough to get him fired, or wrong enough for my mother to take me out of school. When I stole the Pagnol from my mother's house, she had admonished me to be someone she could trust. I tried to be trustworthy. Even that second-rate drama queen Hugo could trust me to have his back when the going got rough. But whom could I trust? No one, I thought. No one.