Over the course of the past few days, I finished reading The Paris Wife and finally got to see Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (thanks to my friend Liz and her very well-timed Netflix arrival!).

Since both of these stories are about the expatriate writers and artists in 1920s Paris (Hemingway, Pound, Stein, The Fitzgeralds, etc.), I feel like I’ve been immersed in that  period with those people and it’s been a grand time, old sport!

Just as I suspected, I loved Midnight in Paris. Love, love, love, love. LOVE! (Please let me know if you require more emphasis in order to truly understand how much I liked this movie.) It was fun and beautiful and I felt like I could relate to the perception that the “golden age” is always in the past and how it feels like previous eras are always better than the present. I used to wish I had lived in the 1960s until I came to the conclusion that I’m probably too uptight to have participated in any of the fun stuff of that era anyway. (wah-wah)

I liked The Paris Wife too, but not enough to warrant any annoyingly repetitive exclamations of love. It was really interesting, but I didn’t like the narrator (Ernest Hemingway’s first wife) all that much – she didn’t seem like the type of woman Ernest would actually have fallen in love with. And even though it’s based on a true story, a lot of it just didn’t seem believable. Maybe because I couldn’t relate to their artistic, jet-setting lifestyle. Has anyone else read it and felt the same way? I will say that I really loved the ending and would still recommend reading it.

But here’s the thing – now I really want to go back to Paris. LIKE RIGHT NOW. And that’s probably not going to happen. I also would really love a chocolate croissant, which is a bit more feasible.

Ahh, c’est la vie…

Images from here and here.