Read Next: Paris Lost and Found by Scott Dominic Carpenter

Scott Dominic Carpenter is a very funny man, and a gifted writer who has perfected the art of rendering the typical day-to-day, real-life scenarios that Americans in France frequently find themselves in — absurd situations having to do with Frenchness in one way or another. The mysteries of dealing with French banks. The frustrating experience of trying to find a particular item in a French hardware store. The human comedy inherent in French co-op building committees. The encounters with French bureaucracy, which seems to eventually squirm its way into every single situation in French life.

And of course the endless challenges of the French language itself, even for a professor of French literature. 

Carpenter makes all of this laugh-out-loud funny. I laughed my way through this book, and often when I wasn’t laughing out loud I was smiling in recognition of familiar territory.  Here’s one example that will be familiar to anyone who is well along the road to becoming completely fluent in French, but not quite there yet.

My go-to technique is called Fake-It-And-Wait. It starts when someone spouts something that goes over my head. Immediately, I pretend that I understand, tenting my fingertips and saying things like ‘ tell me more about that.’ The longer you keep them going, the better the chance the word or phrase will come up again in the merry-go-round of the conversation. Sometimes it takes a while and I find myself crossing out possibilities one by one, like a game of Clue where you’re zeroing in on who bludgeoned Mrs. Peacock in the library with a lead pipe. You keep this going as long as you can, then you make a calculated guess among the options that remain. 

Carpenter’s previous book, French Like Moi: A Midwesterner in Paris, was a delightful read for these reasons. His new book, Paris Lost and Found: A Memoir of Love, offers plenty of laugh-out-loud moments as well, but it also navigates tricky emotional territory as the author describes how for more than a decade he watches helplessly as his beloved wife falls victim to the ravages of Alzheimer’s.

Bit by bit, pages vanished from our mental album. Whole stories were lost. Anne began to fade—not because I’d left her, but because she was leaving me, bit by bit…A few years passed like this, and I became a widower-in-training. Paris began to feel haunted in an anticipatory way.

This part of the story is painfully tender, as he describes the way their lives changed. He takes on the role of caregiver, not only doing all of the housekeeping, grocery shopping, and meal preparation but everything else too, while also finding ways to keep her both safe and happily entertained. For example: “She liked to play a version of gin rummy where I organized her hand and pretended to be surprised by what she had discarded. She had a favorite movie that we watched again and again.”

As if the challenges of dealing with his wife’s illness were not enough, they are quickly followed by the social isolation and general disorientation that engulfed the whole world during the Covid pandemic. Carpenter’s hopes of having his spirits revived with a return to Paris, alone this time, are disappointed as he finds favorite local businesses and restaurants closed, longtime friends moved away from Paris, nothing the same anymore. The very appropriate epigraph to this part of the book is the motto of Paris: Though tossed by the waves, she will not sink.

And he does not sink. Within this sad story, which spins out in its inexorable way over time, Carpenter manages to retain his zest for living not despite, but somehow thanks to the daily absurdities of life in Paris. And to write a book about it that is both funny and sad; true to both extremes of the life passage he and his wife were unwillingly and unanticipatedly thrust into; graced with the wisdom that can be a gift bestowed on those who have been tossed by the waves; and is still fun to read. 

It’s quite a feat.