Baby Poo Fiasco in the Supermarché, and other Paris Happenings, by Darin Strauss:

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So, I'm in Paris. Not the most natural place to be when your paperback is coming out in the US of A - but, I had a plan.

Today, Monday, June 29th, I'm reading at the venerable Shakespeare & Co.  - the independent Parisian bookstore that was instrumental in launching the careers of Hemingway and Joyce.  Plus, I'm scheduled to be interviewed on France24 -- a cable TV station that often does interviews in English - for a segment that's going to run six times today, all across Europe.

Or, that was the plan.

Somehow, though, things got screwed up. My French is bad (I mean, like trying-to-talk-to-a-dog bad). So when I answered France24 that, Yes,  I'd love to be in your studios, by some contortion of bad translation it came out as: Hell, no -I'd never do your stupid show, you French idiots.

So. Off to a good start.

But I did the long booktour (23 cities, I think) for More Than It Hurts You in hardcover. (And thanks Left Bank Books, The Tattered Cover and Powells, for helping get it on local besteller lists.) And I must say, that - TV or no TV - Paris is a pretty nice place from which to launch a book.

I've only been here a day, and I'm running - sputtering? gasping - on 2 hours sleep out of the last 40.  So I'll keep it brief. But here's one story. I'm here with my wife and 20-month-old twin boys. Yesterday, my wife and I took the kids to a supermarché for some diapers. Shepherd, the wild twin, threw some of his burger to the floor as we shopped.  This was like a pebble dropped in the calm water of the store's vibe; soon ripples went in every direction. Like in the scene in Meatballs,  a murmur went up. ("Someone pooped on the floor.") My wife, in her kidergarden French, tried to explain that what they were seeing wasn't babycrap: "It's a food,"she said, "it's a food." But that just made it worse. We seemed like crap-eating freaks.  We left immediately, under an ocean of French hate.

So, it's been a good trip so far. I'm off to take a nap. Tomorrow I'll tell you how the reading went, and what it's like eating dinner with Jonathan Safran Foer and Nicole Krauss, who are here with me, under the auspices of New York Univeristy in Paris.  (Which seems like a misnomer, but who am I to nitpick when they're footing the bills?)

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