The story of two couples who live in the same apartment in north-east Paris almost fifty years apart. In 2019, Anna, a psychoanalyst, is processing a recent miscarriage. Her husband, David, takes a job in London. Hence, she spends days obsessing over renovating the kitchen while befriending a younger woman called Clémentine who has moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective called les colleuses. Meanwhile, in 1972, Florence and Henry are redoing their kitchen. Florence is finishing her degree in psychology while hoping to get pregnant. But Henry isn’t sure he’s ready for fatherhood…Both sets of couples face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy, against a backdrop of political disappointment and intellectual controversy. The characters and their ghosts bump into and weave around each other, unaware that they once inhabited the same space. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Scaffolding is about the bonds we create with people and the difficulty of ever fully severing them; about the ways that people we’ve known live on in us; and about the way that the homes we make hold communal memories of the people who’ve lived in them and the stories that have been told there.
Author
Originally from New York (the suburbs, then the city), I moved to Paris in 1999, settling here for good in 2004; since then I’ve spent varying periods of time in London, Venice, Tokyo, and Hong Kong. Recently transplanted to the Right Bank after years on the Left, I now spend most of my time tramping around Belleville. My essays on books and culture have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, the Times Literary Supplement, the FT, and frieze (some of which you can read here), and I'm a contributing editor at The White Review. I tend to write on women’s writing, experimental poetics, life-writing, studies of place, and visual culture, especially photography. My most recent book, Flâneuse: Women Walk the City, is out in the UK from Chatto & Windus and Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the US. Flâneuse is a cultural history of women writers and artists who have found personal freedom as well as inspiration by engaging with cities on foot, and includes chapters on Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Sophie Calle, and Agnès Varda, among others. It was short-listed for the 2018 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay (I lost to Ursula K. Le Guin, which seems only right). The New York Times Book Review named it an Editor’s Choice and then one of their 100 Notable Books of 2017, Radio 4 very kindly chose it as their Book of the Week, and it was selected as best book of 2016 by the Guardian, the Financial Times, the New Statesman, and the Observer. It has recently been released in Spanish (Malpaso) and is currently being translated into five other languages. Awhile back I wrote a novel called Floating Cities which came out in France under the ridiculous title Une Année à Venise (Editions Héloïse d’Ormesson), and which was awarded the Prix des Lecteurs at the Rue des Livres literary festival. After that I co-authored a book with Scott Esposito called The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement, published by Zer0 Books; I love the Oulipo but after that book, they don’t love me. I’ve been slowly writing my second novel, Scaffolding, set in Paris in 1972 and the present day, which I’ve masochistically chosen to write in both English and French. With Charlotte Mandell, I recently translated Claude Arnaud’s biography of Jean Cocteau (Yale UP, 2016). We won the 2017 French-American Foundation Translation Prize! I recently translated Michelle Perrot’s fascinating history of the bedroom, The Bedroom: An Intimate History, also for Yale UP; that should be out in August 2018.
