Footsteps: In Love with a Frenchman

In this collection of witty and heartfelt essays, Susan Tiberghien takes us on a journey of a marriage grounded in two cultures. Susan is American. Pierre-Yves is French. Together, while living in five different European countries, they raise six children, not to mention balancing family life in three different languages. There is beauty, loneliness, cultural richness, and cuisines described in such vivid details, you’ll believe you are an invited guest at the dining room table.

Footsteps: In Love with a Frenchman also brings the writer’s journey to life. Before she began publishing essays in The International Herald Tribune, The Financial Times, The Christian Science Monitor, among other publications, Susan Tiberghien started out as a young American bride living in Provence. A French housewife in the 1950s, Susan scribbled notes here and there, but was too busy with her family to pursue writing seriously. She was fifty before she attended her first writing workshop. Her first book, Looking for Gold: A Year in Jungian Analysis, was published when she was sixty to great acclaim. Her most recent book, Side by Side: Writing Your Love Story, was published in 2015. She is now eighty and still writing, teaching, and publishing. “It’s never too late to start writing,” is advice she gives at every writers’ conference.

“Footsteps is about a journey on foot through life; it is also a book about the faith that informs and sustains that journey, even if it never mentions a deity—the faith of people yearning to contribute something good to the world and finding ways to do so….It is also about the places we live in, great and small, and about the echoes in a home emptied of its human footsteps when the children are gone on their future and the mother faces an undefined future she never contemplated before.” –Thomas E. Kennedy, The Copenhagen Quartet