PAMELA DRUCKERMAN

When I tell French parents that I know lots of American kids who will eat only pasta or only white rice, they can't believe it. I mean, they can understand how the kid left to his own devices might do that, but they can't imagine that parents would allow that to happen.

How hard or easy it is to raise kids, especially while working, is a big part of people's well-being everywhere.

A large part of the creative process is tolerating the gap between the glorious image you had in your mind and the sad thing you've just made.

One of the maddening things about being a foreigner in France is that hardly anyone in the rest of the world knows what's really happening here. They think Paris is a socialist museum where people are exceptionally good at eating small bits of chocolate and tying scarves.

There's an American idea that you want to look as young as you can for as long as you can. If you can be mistaken for a teenager from behind into your 50s, then you've won; you've succeeded.

When I left for college, I put Miami behind me and tried to have a life of the mind. I got a graduate degree. I traveled. I even married a fellow writer, whose only real estate was a dingy one-bedroom apartment in Paris, where we lived.

Before Donald Trump took office, optimism about his presidency was the lowest of any president-elect since at least the 1970s.

Around my neighborhood, I'm known as the American who talks to her computer while she types.

Podcasts immersed me in colloquial English and put me back in the American zeitgeist.

Certain woman will be jealous of how skinny you are, no matter what's causing it.

Parisians won't admit that they go to the gym, let alone that they're scared of terrorists.

It's fine to discuss money in France, as long as you're complaining that you don't have enough, or boasting about getting a bargain.

When my kids correct my cultural missteps, I sometimes suspect that they're not embarrassed, they're gleeful.

I'm a third-generation Miamian. I'm fond of it. I'm an expatriate, so it's the only American city I can still legitimately claim.

Like practically everyone who grew up in Miami, I knew little about its history. We were more worried about mangoes falling on our cars.

When I moved to Europe 12 years ago, my biggest concern was whether I'd ever speak decent French. Practically every American I knew came to visit, many saying they dreamed of living here, too.

Your child probably won't get into the Ivy League or win a sports scholarship. At age 24, he might be back in his childhood bedroom, in debt, after a mediocre college career. Raise him so that, if that happens, it will still have been worth it.

Unlike the time sink of binge-watching a TV series, podcasts actually made me more efficient. Practically every dull activity - folding laundry, applying makeup - became tolerable when I did it while listening to a country singer describing his hardscrabble childhood, or a novelist defending her open marriage.

Practically every time I speak up at a school conference, a political event, or my apartment building association's annual meeting, I'm met with a display of someone else's superior intelligence.

Discrimination was a problem before terrorism. Now, the bad deeds of a few people have made life worse for millions.

As an American married to an Englishman and living in France, I've spent much of my adult life trying to decode the rules of conversation in three countries. Paradoxically, these rules are almost always unspoken.

I'm not an early adopter. I'll only start wearing new styles of clothing once they're practically out of date, and I won't move into a neighborhood until it's fully saturated with upscale coffee shops.

One of the great joys of a creative life is that your observations and loose moments aren't lost forever; they live in your work.

Eating among the French certainly affected me. After a few years here, I gave up most of my selective food habits.

Parisiennes rarely walk around wearing the giant diamonds that are de rigueur in certain New York neighborhoods.