Paris ” – When Rosetta Stone came out in 1992 I returned

When Rosetta Stone came out in 1992, I returned from Paris to the United States, where I had lived as an expatriate for the past four years and worked as a photojournalist for the City of Lights. Back in Paris, I introduced Darren to my best friend Marion, the editor of Paris Match – my Mindy, of course – with whom I spent hours at Père Tranquille and Café Flore, chatting about our different loves, talking about our early professional struggles and learning to grow up. He convinced me of the idea of a series about a young woman moving to Paris, except that this version would be set in the present, not the late 1980s, and she wouldn’t be a photojournalist with some expensive, explosive ensembles, but, well, he wasn’t sure. There have been several attempts over the years to turn Shutterbabe into a movie or TV series, but I was always told that a female lead with lots of explosives and multiple takes would be too expensive. I’m not responsible for the Rosetta Stone line in Emily in Paris.” “Although I worked on the pilot episode, that line belongs to Darren Starr. One night Candice Bushnell, who wrote the original Sex and the City column on which Darren’s series is based, showed up at Lila’s Closeries withher’ friend, and the two danced Can-Can in the middle of the restaurant. Darren Star bought the rights to Dreamworks, and the executives sent us on a week-long research trip to Paris, which I ended up writing about in O, The Oprah Magazine. So on Sunday nights I’ll lie on the couch in vomit, eat croissant after croissant until I feel pregnant, watch the show, and celebrate all the mistakes and misunderstandings that got me here. It served me decades later in the writer’s room of “Emily in Paris,” a series that adds humor to the “Fish Out of Water” trope of Paris. And now there’s “Emily in Paris,” a Netflix series and a somewhat controversial Golden Globe nominee whose comedic missteps stem from some of my own. I told her about my friend Alex, who worked as a chef at the famous Parisian restaurant Taillevent, and how he fed our group of expats every Sunday, a ritual that New York Times writer John Burnham Schwartz remembered fondly. We ate with my Parisian friends, many of whom told him funny stories about all the mistakes I had made, both in life and in French. But surely working in fashion or luxury would keep “it” in Paris and give “it” a recurring cast of characters as friends and colleagues. One example: during my first month in Paris, I was invited to dinner with my fellow photojournalists.