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Paris: A Love Story Paperback – Illustrated, March 12, 2013
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This is a memoir for anyone who has ever fallen in love in Paris, or with Paris.
PARIS: A LOVE STORY is for anyone who has ever had their heart broken or their life upended.
In this remarkably honest and candid memoir, award-winning journalist and distinguished author Kati Marton narrates an impassioned and romantic story of love, loss, and life after loss. Paris is at the heart of this deeply moving account. Marton paints a vivid portrait of an adventuresome life in the stream of history. Inspirational and deeply human, Paris: A Love Story will touch every generation.
Review
“I stayed up last night and read this book cover to cover. I can’t remember the last time I did that. It is wonderful—touching, romantic and honest—and oh, how it made me want to go to Paris!” -- Barbara Walters
"[A] must-read . . . enthralling" ― Vogue
“Kati Marton has lived a thrilling and turbulent life. … She fell in love with and married two famous men. … She has been an eyewitness to history in all its cruelty. … [I]n this memoir … she grapples with an unexpected new stage of life: widowhood. … [A] delicious read by a well-connected author." ― The Washington Post
“Paris provides a backdrop for this absorbing memoir of love and painful loss, played out on the larger stage of world politics….On a first-name basis with the political movers and shakers on a global stage, Marton has observed world politics in the making and makes space for readers on her catbird seat.” ― Kirkus Reviews
"Kati Marton is a writer of great clarity and grace. Paris: A Love Story is a revealing memoir about the contours of her own humanity, rendered with precision and honesty. It is a memorable story of love, loss and landscape that is as expansive as her remarkable life." -- Steve Coll, author of Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
“A great read—the lightness of love, the drama of war and sudden death—with Paris in the background.” -- Diane von Furstenberg
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Like a human snowplow, I surge against the flow of chanting, banner-waving students pouring into the boulevard St.-Germain. I am determined to get to the Café de Flore before Richard does. My husband has flown all night from Kabul on a military plane. I am merely crossing from the fifth into the sixth arrondissement. As he shuttles between Washington, Kabul, and Islamabad, we have little time together; minutes matter. But this is the Latin Quarter, and it is October, the season of studentmanifestations. Les manifs are a routine feature of my Parisian neighborhood, and I usually enjoy their high-spirited revolutionary theater. Not today. The students have blocked traffic on St.-Germain and prevented Richard’s car from reaching our apartment on the rue des Écoles.
Hot and sweaty, I arrive at the terrace of the Flore. Richard is already there and, as usual these days, he is on the phone. As he is looking up, his smile momentarily lifts travel fatigue from his features. “You’re late!” he says, a hand covering the phone. He hangs up, and we kiss. Then we exhale in unison from sheer relief that we are together—and in Paris! That is how it has been for the past two years. Days stolen from a devouring job.
Richard takes out his frayed wallet to pay for our citrons pressés. “See,” he says, “it’s still here,” a faded Polaroid of the two of us in the Tuileries Garden taken in 1994, wearing matching expressions of goofy happiness. “And I still have this,” he says, proudly extracting the torn corner of a phone message pad with my sister’s Paris telephone number. In 1993, he tracked me down with that number. Hisamulette. “You are a ridiculously sentimental man,” I tell him.
Holding hands, we navigate between the green street cleaning machines that are already vacuuming up the debris of the street protest, as we make our way to the rue des Écoles. We have one night together. He will fly to Brussels the next day for a conference he has called on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
On this balmy fall afternoon, we are not thinking about that. It always feels right to meet in the city where we began our life together. Paris is also roughly midway between Washington and the world’s bleakest conflict zone, Richard’s diplomatic beat. Climbing the narrow, creaky stairs to our pied-à-terre reminds us of other lives we have lived—and lives we planned still to live. In Paris, we wrap our little apartment around ourselves like a blanket, and keep the world outside, barely leaving our village tucked in the shadow of the Pantheon. Tonight we have to.
I am in Paris not only to see my husband but also to launch the French edition of my new book. My book party at the American Embassy is the next night, and it will be the first such event that Richard will not attend. On this, our only evening together, we are dining with Ambassador Charles Rivkin and his wife, Susan Tolson, the hosts of my book event.
Entering the Left Bank restaurant a few hours later, we smile at the sight of a giant poster of my book cover on the glass front door. Several diners acknowledge Richard’s presence with discreet nods. He and I exchange looks of mutual pleasure and pride.
I recall a lurking feeling that things were going too well for us last year. My new book had the best reviews I ever had and I had been named a National Book Critics Circle finalist. Our children were leading productive lives, Lizzie working for the United Nations in Haiti, Chris writing his first book, Richard’s sons, David and Anthony, grown, with beautiful children of their own. Richard had the toughest assignment of his career, but it was work he loved.
I am not a prayerful person. But I recall praying in mid-2010, Please God, don’t let anything bad happen to us. This is my superstitious Hungarian side, that you are punished if you are too happy. When my late-night fears circled, my first thought was for my children. My husband was indestructible. He would always be there to pick up the pieces.
The distant war reaches out for Richard even during dinner. His phone rings and he leaves the table to talk. His soufflé—the restaurant’s specialty—is cold and flat when he returns. His phone rings again and he answers again. This time I scold him. “You are being rude.” He glowers at me and squeezes my hand hard. “You have no idea what’s going on,” he answers. “There is always something going on,” I protest. The ambassador notes Richard’s grip and shoots his wife a look. My husband catches himself. “Try this.” He offers me a forkful of his freshly remade cheese soufflé. A peace offering. I shake my head. “Oh please, it’s so good,” he coaxes me. I relent and he does not answer the next call.
Walking home from the rue de Sèvres, we stop in front of the beautiful Romanesque church of St.-Germain-des-Prés, which anchors this neighborhood. But his phone rings again and I am left to remember alone when I first learned about Romanesque churches from Richard, seventeen years ago, when we fell in love in this city.
• • •
I get up early the next morning. He appears a few hours later, looking sheepish and like an unkempt boy. “You are so disciplined,” he says, finding me with my nose in a book, taking notes. “I have to be,” I answer. “I am not as quick as you. Come,” I say, patting the couch where I am sprawled. “Let’s read together.” Richard has two books in his briefcase, which have traveled back and forth to Afghanistan with him for months: Rudyard Kipling’sKim and John le Carré’s Our Kind of Traitor. “No, I’m going to buy you a new outfit for your book party,” he announces.
Both books are still on his nightstand in the rue des Écoles—unfinished.
Shopping in Paris is one of our rituals. It is the only place in the world Richard enjoys shopping. Our closets are full of Parisian purchases spanning the last decade and a half. In a chic Right Bank boutique, I parade several beautiful suits and dresses. Richard looks up from the phone and nods at the velvet suit I am modeling. “That color looks good on you,” he says. “C’est aubergine, monsieur,” the saleslady interjects. Richard has spotted some shoes of the same shade and, still on the phone, signals the lady to bring those, too. I decline the cashmere overcoat, the color of cream, that he drapes on my shoulder. “Let’s get a coffee,” I say, our time together nearly up.
On the rue de Rivoli, we squeeze into a crowded café terrace, Richard looking for shade, me for a sunny spot. “I’m sorry I can’t stay for your book party,” he says. “That’s the end of your perfect attendance record for four books,” I answer. “But you know I came just to be with you,” he says. “It won’t always be like this,” he promises. The black embassy car is at the curb; the driver is holding the door open. We kiss. It is our last time together in Paris.
From the café on the rue de Rivoli it is a short stroll to the W. H. Smith bookstore, where I now head. On the front table I see Bob Woodward’s new book,Obama’s Wars. I buy a copy and head back out into the October sunshine. At the Tuileries Garden, across the street, I pull up a wrought-iron chair and flip to the index. Holbrooke, R.: a great many listings. I turn to the one that also lists me. A wave of anger and disbelief washes over me as I read. According to Woodward, the president soured on Richard when my husband asked him to call him Richard, not Dick, at the ceremony appointing him special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. “For Kati,” Richard explained, “who is in the audience, and who doesn’t like ‘Dick.’”
How could the president—who once requested that his friends not call him “Barry”—hold this against Richard? I am too agitated to sit for another minute in the sunny gardens. Embarrassed that I made such a big deal of my preference for Richard over Dick, a fact I made clear to him the minute we met, in 1985. Angry that such a trivial matter would turn the president against the man he just assigned his toughest foreign policy job. And then, as I head toward the Seine and home, I am overwhelmed by love for a man who would use his precious one-on-one with the commander in chief to ask a favor, for his wife! No wonder he never mentioned the Woodward book, nor brought a copy home. He was trying to protect me—as always. I have an urge to run after the limousine speeding him now to a military base outside Paris—to tell him I love him, one more time.
• • •
Aside from my superstitious fear that things were going too well for us, there were no signs, no portents of tragedy looming. He played tennis over Thanksgiving weekend in Southampton. We did a marathon of movies, his favorite pastime. But if I believed in signs, there was one. As Richard packed to return to Washington on that Sunday, he searched frantically for his wallet. We looked in all the usual places, emptied all pockets in his closet, and moved the bed and chest of drawers. No sign. Oh well, he said, it’ll turn up. It always has.
I returned to New York, Richard to Washington. Every time he called, he asked if his wallet had turned up. There was no money in it. He had already canceled his credit cards and replaced his security passes. Still, he was agitated that it had not turned up, as it always had in the past. Why are you so upset? I finally asked him. “It’s the picture of us in the Tuileries, and your sister’s telephone number,” he said. “I’ve had them since 1994.” The wallet has still not turned up. Like Richard, it disappeared.
He disappeared. That is how it seems to me. I had assumed that death would be a gradual transition, a passage after long illness, and sad, unhurried good-byes. Not a midlife thunderclap.
One and a half hours before his collapse we were making our Christmas plans on the phone. We were finally getting away. I made him laugh when I described an incident in the news about an overzealous Homeland Security agent at LaGuardia, accused of groping by a diplomat we did not particularly like. An international incident was in the making—though compared to the life-and-death issues on which Richard spent every waking hour, a minor one. “Oh, it feels so good to laugh,” Richard said. Just one more week, I said. “Well, don’t bother coming to Washington this weekend,” he said. “I’ll be at the White House for the president’s year-end review. Got to go meet with David Axelrod at the White House, then Hillary at State. Love you.”
Love you, too.
When he called an hour and a half later I barely recognized his voice. “I feel a pain I have never felt,” he said from the ambulance, en route to the George Washington University Hospital emergency room. This voice of deep pain was not one I had ever heard. “I have no feeling in my legs,” he said. There was fear in my husband’s voice. “I am on my way!” I shouted over the siren’s wail. Those were my last words to Richard.
- Print length240 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherSimon & Schuster
- Publication dateMarch 12, 2013
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.6 x 8.38 inches
- ISBN-101451691556
- ISBN-13978-1451691559
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Product details
- Publisher : Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition (March 12, 2013)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1451691556
- ISBN-13 : 978-1451691559
- Item Weight : 8.9 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.6 x 8.38 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #200,549 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #529 in Women in History
- #977 in Political Leader Biographies
- #6,295 in Memoirs (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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About the author
Kati Marton, an award-winning former NPR and ABC News correspondent, is the author of Hidden Power: Presidential Marriages That Shaped Our History, a New York Times bestseller, as well as Wallenberg, The Polk Conspiracy, A Death in Jerusalem, and a novel, An American Woman. Mother of a son and a daughter, she lives in New York with her husband, Richard Holbrooke.
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I was most touched by the last parts of the book. This morning I re-listend to the last 3 chapters of the audio book (when she learns that Peter Jennings was dying of lung cancer to the closing of the book). I was moved tremendously by her sensitivity, her awareness of self and others, and her courage. After Holbrooke's death she returns to Paris, a source of many of her childhood memories, and her descriptions of Paris and Parisians are not only beautiful, but are informative. I am bit of a traveler myself but have never felt I knew Paris. Her simple descriptions of buying bread, going to the pharmacy, and jogging in this huge city have taught me more about what makes Paris special than any history or travel book could. The reader of the audio book did a wonderful job, and I could have believed it was Kati herself speaking to me. A remarkable book, by a remarkable woman, about remarkable people who have shaped our world of today. Five stars for me.
Imagine trying to write a book about your unusually exciting life when that life involves two now-deceased famous, high-powered men, your sister, your grown children, your parents and your lovers, among other people, living and dead, whose concerns for their own privacy you wish to honor.
While many reviews here are critical of what they refer to as a general superficiality when it comes to the nitty-gritty of many of Kati's relationships, I developed a growing admiration for a woman who, in fact, cared more about the privacy of so many people in her life than she did about her book's ultimate success. Far from being self-centered, Kati shows herself to be a most considerate and loving author--a rarity in the highly competitive book world. (Read the Acknowledgments: "I could not have gotten through the year following Richard's death, nor written this book, without my children's... loving support. It was essntial for me that they read and approve of this work, as they, and their father, are part of the narrative.") So much for egotism.
Now for the book itself: Aside from being a great romp through (and reminder of) good Parisian restaurants, neighborhoods, streets and inns [I made lists], sights, sounds and smells, as well as through a more adult understanding of some literary giants, it is chock full of very interesting stuff because it is true, and therefore overflowing with the immediacy of history.
The Hungarian Revolution? After reading this I looked it up on Wikipedia to refresh my memory and to try to place Kati's experience and that of her parents in accurate historical context. The secret they kept from her all those years really brings the history of that period home with a vengeance.
There is also great truth about the way life can completely fall apart in an unexpected instant, causing one's whole world to come crashing down. Some reviewers here commented on the lack of mention of personal friends. This is not true, in a careful read, although their privacy is also clearly being protected in some cases. What also appears to come through, as the reader enjoys glimpses into Waldorf Astoria dinner parties hosting the likes of the Clintons, Carolyn Kennedy, and assorted movie stars, is the way
so many of these folks seem to be around when famous husbands are around, but also seem to melt away (not all of them, apparently) when life and lifestyle change.
We also get a glimpse into the personality of a vulnerable young woman so in love that she cannot stop trying to make better something that will never be better, regardless of whether she works at all, or works at home, or gives up work entirely. The part in which she travels 7 hours through a dangerous snowstorm just to be with Jennings, only to have him cold-shoulder her all weekend because she had dinner with the men who drove her [at least, that's her version], before rushing home to him, is very illuminating, as is the part where she crosses dangerous borders just to surprise and be with him. . .and finds herself unable to return the way she came, whether by car, plane or camel.
What's it like to be a TV reporter, ready at a moment's notice to pack up and go--as quickly as possible-- to any part of the world where the latest news is happening? Some people, like Kati, appear to have thrived on it. I think this memoir paints a picture of that lifestyle quite clearly.
I plan to read Kati's other books after having read this one.
Top reviews from other countries
I would recommend it to anyone interested in history of the 20th Century as well as all people who delight in fabulous love stories.