How to Seduce a Frenchman

Encounters with Frédéric Beigbeder

I’ve been told I come across “less superficial” in French. I speak fluently enough to hold my own in philosophical conversation and even land the occasional witty remark. Still, my silences project a certain naiveté: I smile at nihilistic men on the metro in a way that indicates I do not grasp the weight of human existence and perk up at the sound of my name with emphasis on the last syllable. In my 20s, this Americana-inspired brand of artful simplicity worked on Frenchmen like catnip and for a time I thought I might even write a book on the topic.

When my appearance on an obscure reality TV show made it to The Today Show with Kathie Lee and Hoda, I leveraged the opportunity to ask one of France’s most renowned media personalities if he might grant me an interview for said book.

Tentatively, I’d titled it How to Seduce a Frenchman.

I’ve always thought of Frédéric Beigbeder as a kind of gateway drug to contemporary literature writ large. Come to read about his arrest for sniffing cocaine on the hood of a Bentley; stay for his poignant auto fiction and conversations with the likes of James Salter or Françoise Sagan.

He’s an outspoken advocate for legalizing the world’s oldest profession who would generate controversy in the years following our interview for having once bestowed a coveted literary prize upon now-disgraced author Gabriel Matzneff. One might assume Beigbeder accepted the interview with less than honorable intentions and yet. My encounter with Beigbeder remains engraved in my mind as one of my earliest and most beautiful memories of being taken seriously as a writer. He showed up to our designated appointment at the back of a Parisian wine bar with his unmistakable hair and enchanting green eyes; we stayed firmly and professionally on topics of love in the literary canon.

We spoke about the dangers of Casanova as compared to Don Juan. About all the different flavors of love and why infidelity is highly overrated. About craft and why it’s generally better to write in the morning. 

(One can always, he insisted, find better things to do in bed at night.) 

That book proposal landed me in couples’ therapy before it ever made it off my hard drive.

The old adage is true: a writer can choose what she writes about but she can’t choose what she makes live. With the benefit of time and distance from the topic I occasionally try to revive my early drafts to no avail. Everything reads like a poor imitation of Mireille Guiliano or Pamela Druckerman. Not to mention Emily in Paris has emerged to both confirm my market and steal my thunder besides. (Who needs a book when you can simply soak up the eye-candy that is Gabriel?)

Objectively speaking, my Frenchmen are dead. 

Beigbeder’s latest mass market paperback landed on bookstore shelves across France this April. Titled Confessions d’un Hétérosexuel Légèrement Dépassé, it’s an impassioned plea for the de-cancellation of heterosexual desire in a post-#MeToo world. (“Please give me the instruction manual for a passionate affair where no one suffers, for a hot night where no one dominates anyone. Tell me how to pleasure a woman without ever surprising her.”)

It wasn’t until I perused a copy at a Point Relay in Charles de Gaulle that the crux of my writer’s block clarified itself: I chose a book topic that never really had legs. It takes Beigbeder all of a paragraph to summarize an exhaustive list of seduction strategies that work on him every time. He’s a sucker for a bra strap peaking out over a woman’s shoulder, for nail polish, and stilettos.

Page 130: “Dès que je rencontre une femme, je l’imagine en train de faire l’amour.” 

“As soon as I meet a woman, I imagine her making love.”

No doubt this makes me a bad feminist, but — 

I’m mostly curious if I was any good.