Lauren Collins, author of "When in French"

There’s little more universally enticing than a story about someone setting off on a great voyage: an intrepid adventurer protagonist. This week, the book I’m discussing is just that – a journey into unknown frontiers, both geographically and linguistically. Today I’m speaking with author and journalist Lauren Collins. Lauren, a staff writer with the New Yorker since 2008, published her incredible debut novel, When In French: Love in a Second Language, to huge acclaim in 2016. In this episode, Lauren and I get into the idea of language – the experience of being a person who lives between two languages, the evolution and porosity of language, L’Academie Francaise (the three-headed dog that guards French grammar), and some technical aspects of a few high-impact linguistic theories. In our interview today, Lauren told me about the book Je ne suis pas Parisienne, by Alice Pfeiffer (2019) – a series of essays written by a journalist, repudiating the ‘Parisian woman’ cliché. Her favorite book that I’ve probably never heard of is The Smile Revolution, by Colin Jones (2014), a cultural history of smiling. Her four best books from the last 12 months are We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland, by Fintan O’Toole (2021), Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, by Saidiya Hartman (2019), Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey (2023), and South to America, by Imani Perry (2022). Finally, the book she would take to a desert island is Lucy Sante’s The Other Paris: An illustrated journey through a city’s poor and Bohemian past (2015), a guided-tour through the Paris of a bygone era.