What French Women Know

Starred review from November 30, 2009
Ollivier's manifesto belongs in that rare class of books that must be listened to on audio rather than read in print. Her performance of her own book is so delicious and pitch-perfect that it demands a hearing, if for nothing else than the hilarious recounted conversations between herself and various French female interlocutors, whom she presents with a faultless blend of Gallic style and nonchalance. Her accent is impeccable—to American ears, anyway—achieved during a decade of living in France and being married to a Frenchman. As she wends her way through love, sex, food, sex, child-rearing, sex, politics, and more sex, Ollivier compares American women's neuroticism and anxiety to French women's devil-may-care attitude. Vive la difference
! A Putnam hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 12).

August 31, 2009
American-born Francophile Ollivier follows up Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl with a volume largely concerned with uncovering the behavior and lifestyle of the secretive French woman. For instance, Ollivier pointedly debunks the myth that French women deprive themselves of fattening foods and drink in order to maintain a suitable weight, but reveals that French women are masters of portion control. She also recounts instances with her French counterparts-she lived there for 10 years, has a French husband, and divides her time between L.A. and Paris-in which she came to the realization that, in France, women genuinely love men, and vice versa; both strive for more compatibility between the sexes, radically diminishing the "battle of the sexes" mentality so commonplace in American society. Intriguingly, Ollivier contrasts the French desire for mystery against the American need for knowledge and control, finding in the discrepancy a possible reason for the ever-escalating American divorce rate. Ollivier is sure to dazzle any reader with a fondness for French women with this batch of anecdotes and corresponding hypotheses, drizzled with a winning combination of sarcasm and wit.