“It was like a gathering storm, you hear the thunder in the distance then a trickle of rain,” she said. She noticed waiters calling her the mature madame instead of the youthful mademoiselle and realized she was now middle-aged. The French had a different attitude to child rearing than the Americans, she realized.Ĭafe culture also provided the inspiration for There Are No Grown-Ups.

She noticed that, unlike their child, French toddlers ate a varied diet and didn’t throw their food about or run around the restaurant. The idea for Bringing Up Bébé came to her while eating out with Simon (by then her husband) and their then 18-month-old daughter. A few months after leaving the paper, she moved from New York to Paris to be with him and has lived there ever since. Shortly before being made redundant in 2002, she met Simon Kuper, a British sports writer, while on assignment in Buenos Aires. Somehow I felt very opened up to them and I needed to exchange with them … I was able to share the experience in a way that surprised me.”ĭruckerman, 48, is also a journalist and was a foreign reporter for the Wall Street Journal in her late 20s and early 30s. I was quite a private person and I got a lot of solace from a few friends who had been through very intense health crises themselves. She laughs, adding: “And here we are, out of my comfort zone.”Īnother pause, then: “I’m not sure … It was a shock. I just couldn’t leave that out because it was such a big part.” “Umm … yeah … I think it is still difficult, but I was trying to tell the story. Particularly difficult to write was the chapter on being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma when she was in her early 40s, and her subsequent successful chemotherapy and immunotherapy treatment.Īsked if it’s still hard to talk about, she pauses, nodding her head slowly. If you’re not honest it’s not going to work, and so I really pushed myself beyond my comfort zone.” “Everyone says you just have to be honest. “I read a lot about memoir writing when I was writing this book,” she tells the Guardian. Druckerman’s writing is humorous, conversational and revealing, so it’s surprising when she admits to finding it “incredibly hard” to open up.

Bébé Day by Day by Pamela Druckerman