ABOUT JANICE
Many years ago while working for an American entrepreneur in Paris, Janice decided to quit her job and take off with her camera and backpack to see the world. When her boss read her letter of resignation, he responded in his deep Texan drawl, “You tell that girl she otta be a writer.”
She did just that.
The Official Take
Janice Graham was raised in Kansas and obtained her M.A. in French literature before pursuing graduate film studies at USC and English literature at UCLA in Los Angeles, California. Her screenplay Until September, a romantic comedy situated in Paris, was made into a film starring Karen Allen and Thierry Lhermitte. Her first novel, Firebird, became a New York Times and international bestseller. After a series of contemporary women’s fiction, she turned to historical fiction—first with The Tailor’s Daughter, then with Romancing Miss Brontë, her critically acclaimed novel about Charlotte Brontë, written as Juliet Gael. She labored for many years over a very long novel about Mary Shelley, until she got fed up and stashed it away out of sight. Then, locked down in Paris during COVID and needing to laugh, she wrote Red Lily, a whimsical caper full of spies, dogs, and a lot of quirky characters who were much more fun to hang out with than the Shelleys. She has lived in Paris, Athens, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Kansas City and Florence, and has finally settled back in Paris.
What Really Happened
Part One:
After I finished graduate school, I took my little bit of savings, packed a suitcase, and set off for Paris—which made a lot more sense than teaching French in the Midwest. I majored in education because I was told, “It’s something you can always fall back on,” and if I was going to be doing any falling, it was forward, on my face, or in love—anything other than ‘back.’
It was an exciting time to be in Paris; students weren’t ripping up the cobblestones in St. Michel, as they’d done in the sixties, but we did get chased around the streets a lot by riot police. It was the height of the Vietnam war, and Americans weren’t very well received. My French was pretty near flawless, at least native-enough so that nobody guessed I was American, so they spared me their political tongue-lashings, and I streamed through those days with heart and mind open wide, melding easily into a culture whose history and literature I knew better than my own.
In those days, you couldn’t find French preserves on a supermarket shelf in Kansas City, like you can now, or peanut butter in your neighborhood Parisian Monoprix. France was marvelously, distinctly unique and thrilling, albeit inconvenient. Not everyone had a home telephone, and many of us lived in seventh-floor walk-ups without bathrooms—only a communal Water Closet down the hall (and they really were just a tiny closet…with a stool and a window. Once I found a half-drowned sparrow in the toilet bowl.)
I missed my popcorn in the movie theaters, and it upset me to have to deal with those snippy little ladies in the aisles with their flashlights waiting to usher you to your seat, for a tip of course. I hated the milk and loved the cream and butter. I made a point of trying one new pastry a week and learning its name. I remember the first time I watched a French girl whip up homemade vinaigrette (the secret is Maille mustard); when I asked her how she knew how much vinegar to use, she just shot me a look, like…well, you can imagine. I was young and impressionable, and Paris formed my tastes in matters of heart and food and music and manners. And men of course. (Those stories go into my novels.)
I took whatever work I could get—translating aerospace documents, rewriting investment portfolios for the Rothschild Bank, working as a nanny for an Australian embassy official, selling furniture in a nifty little Scandinavian design shop run by a young Columbian woman whom I thought the chicest, most self-confident thing I’d ever seen. Everybody came from somewhere else, and our dinner parties were a Babel-like feast of sounds where the first rule of etiquette was finding a common language that everyone could understand. Lovers slept with dictionaries under their pillows.
That first year, I had over a dozen different ‘homes’ and as many jobs. The idea of nailing my flippers to the ocean floor put the fear of the devil in me. Discovery and experience—people, places, language—was what drove me.
Somewhere along the way, the storyteller was born.
To Be Continued:
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