Another Fine French Book Giveaway

I love to read about France, my adopted country, and particularly the South. And I especially love books by and about expats in Provence, for all the obvious reasons. So when I received an advance copy of The House in France, I shoved all the other books and magazines aside and dug in right away. I knew the author Gully Wells was an editor at Conde Nast Traveler in New York and I knew, from bits of things I’d read, that she leads a big, interesting, literary life. Beyond that, I had no clue what to expect. But I was pretty sure it was going to be fun.

Turns out, The House in France is really only peripherally about the Wells’ family home and life in Provence--but I loved it anyway. The book provides a wonderful glimpse into a world I knew nothing about: the liberal, intellectual, literary world of London of the 1960s. The ramshackle farmhouse, which Gully’s mom bought on impulse in 1963, was meant as a vacation home but in many ways, it became home base. It’s where everyone in Gully’s clan retreats to rest and regroup and reconnect.

Gully was born in Paris, brought up in London, educated at Oxford, and moved to New York in 1979. Her memoir globetrots as she does but it’s set mainly in Provence, London, and New York. It chronicles three generations of her fairly eccentric family, most notably her mother Dee Wells (a glamorous, rebellious American journalist and TV commentator, a self-described “wild savage” who “found nice people dull”) and her stepfather A.J. Ayer, a celebrated Oxford philosopher and prodigious womanizer who everyone called Freddie.

Along the way, we also meet Gully’s “enormously attractive” father, who had “an enviable talent for extracting a huge amount of pleasure from every moment in the day.” Of her childhood, she writes: “It struck me as perfectly normal that I should live with my mother in London and then be sent off each vacation—like an airmail package—from Heathrow, with a label pinned to my lapel, to stay with my father wherever he happened to be.”

Her father, a diplomat who lived mainly in Germany, took Gully skiing in winter and to Italy in summer in his snappy white Mercedes convertible. (Now we know where her love of travel came from.) Freddie, on the other hand, “lived in London, took me to French restaurants, fed me my first snail and didn’t know how to drive.”

“They could not have been less alike, she writes, and I loved them both.”

We also get to meet Gully’s adored half-brother Nick, her various boyfriends (such as Martin Amis, her first love), and finally, her husband Peter (a BBC producer) and kids Rebecca and Alexander. Orbiting this core group are a whole universe of luminaries such as Alan Bennett, Isaiah Berlin, Iris Murdoch, Bertrand Russell, Jonathan Miller, Christopher Hitchens, Vanessa Lawson (Nigella’s mom), Anna Wintour and many more. Even Robert Kennedy, New York Mayor John Lindsay and Mike Tyson made cameos in Gully World.

It was the author’s relationship with her mother, however, that forms the backbone of the book—and that’s where the house in France comes in. Called La Migoua, it’s perched on a hill between Toulon and Marseilles. Here the family enjoyed languid meals under the lime tree, nosy but loving neighbors popping round with slobbering dogs and bottles of homemade vin d’orange. There were hot summer days at Bikini Beach, mountain hikes, fresh local food toted home from nearby markets and all the other things we associate with summertime in Provence. If you’ve spent any time at all in these parts (or seen Provence in countless movies), you can picture the house perfectly: the thick stone walls, the clackety beads in the doorway, the old baskets and dusty herbs hanging from the beams, the marble topped dining table with rush-seated wooden chairs (“like the one in van Gogh’s painting of his bedroom in Arles”), the enormous blackened fireplace. After her mother dies, in 2003, it’s six years before Gully feels ready to return, so closely tied in her mind were her mother and the house. And yes, Gully still has the house.

My only gripe about The House in France was that it had no photos. I wanted to see what all these colorful people looked like…and, of course, I wanted to see the house. Well now I see that the finished hardcover, released a couple weeks ago, has 16 pages of photos--which makes the story even more compelling.

Want the book? The fine folks at Knopf Publishing have offered me two copies to give away. Simply leave a comment below and two will be chosen next week. Make sure you leave us your email address, somewhere within your comment.  And if you don’t win a copy, you can buy it on Amazon by clicking here. The Kindle edition is here.