Paris Lost & Found: A Memoir of Love by Scott Dominic Carpenter
Paris is known as the City of Light, but for Scott Dominic Carpenter, who splits his time between St. Paul and Paris, it also became the City of Loss. Carpenter’s first memoir FRENCH LIKE MOI, introduced readers to a different Paris – the day-to-day life of an expat living in the not so cool part of town making faux pas at every turn and turning them into comedic sausage.
In his new memoir, PARIS LOST & FOUND, he wrestles with tragedy, as his wife Anne succumbs to Alzheimer’s Disease. Carpenter begins his tale in the Dordogne Valley, with a flashback to the time he was recruited to accompany a tour group in exchange for several evening lectures about life in France. During the daytime, he and Anne travelled with the group of three dozen other Americans as they were dragged through what seemed to be a very stylized tour of the country’s most iconic tourist traps: wine and cheese tastings, chocolate tastings, and a two-hour folkloric dance performed by locals. When Carpenter had an opportunity out of earshot of the others, he asked one of the dancers how often they performed. As he sucked on a cigarette, the Frenchman intoned, blowing smoke from his nostrils, that they only did that shit for tourists. Carpenter felt “like a kid in Disneyland who bumps into Mickey Mouse on a cigarette break, the mouse head pulled off.” Something was amiss in Paris. He bemoaned the fact that the tourists were not experiencing the real Paris but a facsimile of it – until they returned to the hotel and discovered that there had been a real-live heist – the wall safes ripped from the rooms and wallets, jewelry, and passports stolen. After the day’s tiresome tour, Carpenter relished the drama and Anne remarked that she’d never forget the experience. Except, she did.
As Anne’s disease progressed, they returned to America just as the country and the rest of the world was shutting down because of the pandemic.
After Anne’s death, Carpenter returned to Paris, still struggling with grief and learning how to operate in the world as a single person. With some encouragement from friends, Carpenter eventually decided to reengage with the twenty-first century’s version for meeting new people – the dating app. For Carpenter, Paris had come full circle – from the City of Light, to the City of Loss, to the City of Love.
Carpenter brings his midwestern sensibility and deprecating sense of humor into every story in PARIS LOST & FOUND, whether sleuthing the source of a human turd found in the garbage carrell in his condo building or negotiating the complications of the French banking system – we’re rooting him on, because by the end of the memoir, he’s our guy, fumbling his way into a new life in Paris, the City of Love.
Listen to my conversation with Scott Carpenter on October 24 at 7pm and the 26th at 6am on Superior Reads.
