Women and freedom in the City of Light: Bonjour, Paris!

In Paris, the most literary setting of all, I cast roles for my characters and explore what freedom means to me, a woman at midlife who is still in the process of becoming.

For a few years, my older daughter was lucky enough to live on this beautiful street in Montmartre and I was lucky enough to stay there. Photo by Marloes Hilckmann on Unsplash

There’s a certain kind of freedom that comes to a woman in late midlife when she’s finally made the decision—often at a great cost—to live the life she’s always wanted.

As I walk around the beautiful streets of Paris, I am struck by how French women seem to carry this sense of freedom and self-confidence as if it is their birthright. They seem comfortable in their own skin, able to embrace their beauty and worth in a way that even at 64, I often still struggle to attain. I know that I am projecting onto these women traits that I aspire to and if I were to stop them in the street, and ask them, they’d no doubt tell me that their lives are as complicated as anyone else’s.

Still, it fires up my imagination, the perceived freedom and forthright elegance of these French women. It is my imagination that wants to strut the streets of Montmartre like nobody’s business, peering into the heads and hearts of Parisiennes, casting them as characters in my own dream world.

In 2021, at the height of the pandemic, as the world as we knew it got stranger and more frightening, I signed up for the annual Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month), an annual, international creative writing event in which participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript during the month of November. As I started to write, surrounded by sickness and death, quarantines and a growing sense of unreality, an American woman in her mid-50s walked into my imagination. I called her Annie. After a lifetime of taking care of everyone but herself, she was on the brink of remaking her life into one she’d only dreamed of—if only she could find the courage and confidence to cross the threshold and grasp her birthright.

So, of course, I sent her to Paris. Her bags were packed with a wealth of complications (that’s how readers keep turning the pages) but ah, the setting! In the dark days of 2021, that’s where I played, with Annie, in the City of Light. Her life could be a hot mess (and it often was), but step outside and walk up the steps of Sacre Coeur, or sit at the famed literary cafés Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore, stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens—and la vie est douce (life is sweet) once more.

Annie finds love in Paris. Of course she does! Mais bien sûr! This was my counter world to the pandemic and I would frost the cake I was baking any way I chose. A mille-feuille with its layers of crispiness and creaminess, Annie’s life was mine to make and unmake and make again. She lived in my heart and my head throughout 2021 and 2022, and together we survived a pandemic. In 2023, somewhere around draft six or seven, I knew she was ready to leave my imagination to try her fate connecting with another human’s imagination. By spring of this year, RESCUING ANNIE was out in the world, on submission to literary agents. She’s still looking for someone to fall in love with her. But she’ll always have Paris.

My younger daughter Sara lives in Paris. I am here for a week’s visit, staying with her and her boyfriend about eight kilometers from the city center in Asnieres-sur-Seine. We’ve been looking forward to this mother-daughter time together for months. She’s just returned from a five-week research trip to Nairobi, Kenya for her PhD dissertation in environmental policy and ready to explore the charms of Paris with me.

My first visit to Paris was in 1984, with a former boyfriend. It was then my love affair with Paris began and it outlasted that boyfriend and others that would follow. Eventually, my affection for Paris would prove sturdier than even my 33-year marriage which I ended in 2022.

Hemingway famously referred to Paris as a “moveable feast.” In my 40s I wrote a short story called “Finding Joy in Paris,” about a woman at midlife named Joy, single and at loose ends to find her purpose, coaxed into a trip to Paris by her best friend. The title delivered the double meaning I sought: she finds joy and herself in Paris, including a meet-cute with a Notre Dame backdrop. Looking back, remembering the depths of my marital unhappiness in my 40s and the truths I was not ready to acknowledge, I can see Joy was my doppelganger. It would take me two decades to catch up with her.

I returned to Paris many times, especially during the years after my older daughter Marielle moved there for work, living in a studio in Montmartre on one of Paris’ most picturesque streets. Now I had both daughters living in the city that had occupied my romantic heart since my 20s, and more reasons to visit.

Mother-daughter Paris visit, spring 2016

One of my favorite visits to Paris was in 2016 when my mother traveled with me from the U.S. to spend a week in Paris with Marielle. A prolific reader who gave birth to my own love affair with books, Paris was also the city of Freda’s dreams. It was such a delight to see her drink in its pleasures—the art (including Musée Picasso, her favorite artist) and the architecture, the Seine and its bookstalls, Cafe Flore with photos of Hemingway on the wall, Notre Dame framed by the cherry blossoms in full bloom because we were visiting Paris in April, all the more magical for Mom who shared a love for this song with my father Norman.

I wanted to give Mom her own version of one of her favorite films, Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” in which a disillusioned screenwriter Gil Pender steps back in time to 1920s Paris, meeting his literary and artistic heroes: Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, among others. If I could have materialized Gil’s magical car for Freda and delivered her to a party for Jean Cocteau, I would have.

No doubt this visit will brings its own magic. It can’t be any other way, walking arm in arm with Sara, as if Paris were our birthright, too.

With my daughter Sara in the Montmartre section of Paris.

Freedom—the freedom I invented for my character Annie, the freedom in the proud bearing of the women of Paris, the freedom I purchased for myself at no small cost when I initiated the end of my marriage, the sorrowful freedom when my dementia caregiving role for Mom ended with her death this past April—all of it has been much on my mind these weeks traveling in Europe.

What is freedom, for a woman, in midlife? What’s the secret? Insomnia has been my undesired companion lately. My mind spins and turns as I lie in my friend’s guest room bed. Just after midnight, I scrawl in my journal:

Freedom is loving who we are, exactly as we are.

“You’re free,” my friends tell me, knowing that these cataclysmic life events are behind me now. “You can do whatever you want, live where ever you want.” I am, it seems, in full control of my destiny in a way I never have been before. No longer married or partnered, with fully grown, independent children, no mortgage to tie me down, and work as a writer I can do remotely from anywhere. All the ingredients are there to be as free as I wish.

And yet. This is a practice. This is a process. This is a becoming. I will have to continue to work hard to not shackle myself in a prison of my own making where Insecurity and Anxiety and Fear are the wardens, jangling the keys to my freedom in their pockets. They are the ones that keep me up at night, softly whispering that safety lies in having my life stay more or less the same. Risk-taking is dangerous, they say, with wagging fingers.

I am getting better at ignoring them. You see, the door to the cell that contains the whole of me is unlocked. It always has been. My imprisonment is only a facade. And I’m ready to break down the barriers.

In Deborah Levy’s wonderful, lyrical memoir Cost of Living, a chronicle of her life after her divorce, she writes:

“Now that I was no longer married to society, I was transitioning into something or someone else. What and who would that be? How could I describe this odd feeling of dissolving and recomposing? When words close the mind, we can be sure that someone has been reduced to nothingness.”

In a recent Letter from Love, inspired by

Letters From Love with Elizabeth Gilbert

, on the question of “Who am I becoming?” Love answered me this way in the pages of my journal. These are the words that open my mind, the ones that keep my head held high on the streets of Paris and that will be my companion when I walk the Camino de Santiago.

Dear Love,

Who am I becoming?

Dearest one, sunny sailor at the helm of her own fine boat--at long last--can you see the horizon? Better yet, can you believe in the horizon? The one you can't quite see, but you know is there. In other words, in this becoming, can you accept all that you do not know and cannot see? This is so important, my earnest sunflower, especially when you are in this state of both Becoming and Unbecoming.

It is a vague, fluid, liminal space, this time of becoming who you are (which may, I remind you, my morning dove, is who you have been all along?) while unbecoming the things you once thought you were.

This Unbecoming merging with Becoming has been jarring for you, darling, and at times pretty awful. I hold that hurt for you. You have "unbecome" a wife after 33 years, you have unbecome a homeowner, you have unbecome a woman whose fate was tethered to this particular man, the one whose hand you let go of--the hardest act of your life--because you needed to walk alone. For a time. Perhaps not forever, love. Shall we wait and see what happens? Can you be patient, open and curious, dear one, for the unfolding of all that you are becoming in your 64th year?

I promise you that whatever happens, as you renew your commitment to a creative, audacious life on your own terms, you won't be walking this road alone. I am right there beside you. You are not the only one at the helm of this fine boat as you steer it toward the beautiful, unknowable horizon. We are charting this course together.

Love, Love

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In the comments let’s talk about what freedom means to you. And if you’re a woman at midlife has freedom taken on new meaning? Do you feel you are in the process of becoming, even in (late) adulthood?

For your listening enjoyment, to transport yourself to Paris, here’s the playlist I compiled while dreaming up Annie’s world.