Her Royal Majesty has just published a wonderful interview with the Paris-based writer Anne Marsella, author of Remedy and The Baby of Belleville.  An excerpt:

Both of your novels are set in Paris. What about Paris interests you as a writer? Is your Paris different from the “written Paris” you have inherited?
Remedy, Patsy Boone and The Baby of Belleville comprise my Parisian trilogy with Remedy and Patsy Boone working as mirror narratives, the first written in English, the latter in French. All three novels depict Paris as a city of overlapping, multiple worlds where Muslim matriarchs, French aristocrats, immigrant plumbers, Catholic nuns, American expats and a host of others entwine destinies in unexpected ways, and this fictive world, as strange and “whimsical” as it may seem to some, does in fact reflect the “real” Paris where I’ve resided for many years.  In Remedy I play with stereotypes of the American in Paris and displace them, so that they are no longer quite recognizable. The romanticized Paris played up in books like Adam Gopnik’s beautifully penned Paris to the Moon, simply does not seem real to me. I often think the myth of Paris is held too dear and to the detriment of seeing what is really going on here. I wonder how one can write a book about Paris and France in general without exploring its colonial past or lending an ear to its immigrant populations which have largely brought the country to its current prosperity. My imagination has been naturally drawn to these immigrant communities in the north-east of Paris, perhaps because I am an immigrant as well, and the question of exile and how it places one at the crux of myriad contradictions interest me: how can one make a home where one is not at home (and constantly harassed as with the sans papiers)?; what does it mean to be oneself, when one is perceived as other, particularly as an unwanted Other?; but also because in a city so groomed and polished, it is through the cracks and fissures of these more neglected neighbourhoods that my imagination has been able to make its entry. Right now France struggles to uphold its ideals of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité against the winds of a growing xenophobia. My novels are not political in any obvious way, but they touch upon these current realities of French life.

This, to me, is the kind of writing about Paris that I can get behind. Read the full interview here. And you can read my 2008 interview with Anne here.