The Irrepressible Lily Heise
Photograph by www.DiscoverParis.net
I first met Lily about five years ago at a bloggers’ meet-up in Paris. At that time and at subsequent social events, she impressed me as a cheerful person with a bubbly personality. Little did I suspect that within the body of that effervescent persona beat the heart of a woman with the passion of an exploding volcano! I found that out just two weeks ago when I accepted her invitation to attend the launch of her first book, Je t’aime…me neither. There, at the Abbey Bookshop in Paris, she announced that her new book was about the saga of her search for love in the City of Light. It turns out that she found it…and then lost it…and then found it and lost it…again and again!
What makes her book more than a kiss-and-tell story is that she readily admits that her adventures have all ended in failure of some sort. (At least, that is what she told the audience at the book launch.) But she analyzes each failure in a humoristic way before she moves on to the next adventure. And she does move on! At the disappointing end of every adventure she manages to step back and find humor, even if it is dark humor, in her distress.
Lily Heise with Her New Book
Photograph by www.DiscoverParis.net
The night of the launch, the audience enjoyed her wit as she read several accounts of her adventures from her book.
Here is an excerpt:
Je ne t’aime plus (Stephane)
“Je ne t’aime plus.”
What do you mean . . . you don’t love me anymore? I sat there, dumbfounded, staring at my boyfriend—or rather, my exboyfriend—his words slowly sinking in. Once they had, the emotional floodgate opened, unleashing hot tears streaming down my cheeks.
What did he just say? He had never said that he did love me, so how could he not love me anymore? While I was trying to grapple with this unpleasant detail, another one hit me. Hey! I was being broken up with! This made me cry even harder. Here I was, in my tiny Parisian apartment, overlooking the eternal City of Amour, which had just transformed into the City of Désamour, as I was now unloved, dumped, ditched, or, in French: larguée.
This wasn’t how things were supposed to happen.
This experience must have been a sad moment for Lily, but when she read the passage in her sing-song voice the audience roared with laughter. (Not laughing at her, mind you, but with her.)
She saved the best passage for last:
A Roll in the Hay (Julian)
Where am I? Who am I with? More importantly . . . who am I kissing? These are not good questions to wake up asking yourself, especially when you don’t know the answers! Well, from what I could immediately gather, the answer to the first question seemed to be “a wheat field,” which could have been pretty much anywhere. The answers to the other two questions would remain—for the time being—something of a mystery . . .
How had I ended up in a wheat field at the crack of dawn being ferociously kissed by a young, sun-streaked blond stud?
No, I wasn’t on the set of the kind of racy TV show screened after midnight on French public channels. And no, I hadn’t gotten lost on a hike in the country and been rescued by a shepherd boy . . . or had I?
Intrigued? Lily leaves it to us to buy the book to learn the answer to this mystery.
Lily has given Je t’aime…me neither her heart and soul. Five years in the writing—and thirteen years of extensive research—have gone into its creation. Put this one at the top of your list of must-read books for the summer!
To learn more about the book, click here
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To purchase the Kindle edition, click here
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