Julie Scolnik - Paris Blue: A Memoir of First Love

PRAISE FOR

PARIS BLUE

Not every true story is like a good novel, but this one is. Not every memoir of first love has a satisfying ending, but this one does. The confluence of first love with becoming an artist makes this memoir special.

John Irving, best-selling author of seventeen novels

Julie Scolniks memoir, Paris Blue, brings full spectrum color to a love affair with Paris, music, and a man whose limited vision couldnt keep her from shining. Filled with sensuousness, sound, and light, as well as the hard edge of truth, this story of first love grips the reader tight.

Jennifer Rosner, author of If a Tree Falls and The Yellow Bird Sings

Paris Blue gives melody to our common fancy: that Paris is where all great romances play out. Julie Scolniks memoir, recalling for us the myopia of innocence, returns us to our own first loves while establishing itself as a riveting tale both unique and universal.

Gregory Maguire, novelist, and author of Wicked

The haunting impact of our first true and deep love stays with us the remainder of our lives, and all of us struggle in some way to put those emotionsthe exultation, the revelries of passion and belonging, and the ultimate scars of lossinto a workable context. This memoir explores the process, including the barriers, the relapses and the ultimate conclusion that ones life needs to find its own forms.

Greg Fields, author of Arc of the Comet and Through the Waters and the Wild

Paris Blue , Julie Scolnik s memoir of first love in Paris, is written with the tender romanticism of Wordsworth and the devastating realism of Flaubert. Her lyrical writing about music transforms these discordant halves into a compelling whole, creating a dazzling love letter to a life lived in music.

Linda Katherine Cutting, author of Memory Slips

Captivating! Paris Blue could speak to anyone whos ever yearned for closure that never came. But Julie Scolniks memoir doesnt simply try to make sense of a bewildering romance; through telling the story she manages to bless the past, in all its complexity, while giving herself fully to the present.

Leah Hager Cohen, author of Strangers and Cousins and The Grief of Others

Julie Scolniks beautiful page turner of a memoir captures with rare insight the power of music, words, and Paris to drive love to madness. To read her pitch perfect writing is to relive the exhilarations and vulnerabilities of ones twenties.

Judith Coffin, author of Sex, Love, and Letters: Writing Simone de Beauvoir

Nothing burns hotter than young love, and Julie Scolnik captures that singular fervor in Paris Blue. But her memoir is more than that: its a deeply felt, bittersweet reflection on how youthful passion changes you and clings to you, forever.

Howard Reich, author of Prisoner of Her Past , and The Art of Inventing Hope: Intimate Conversations with Elie Wiesel

Paris Blue drew me in from the opening descriptions of France through a young American womans eyes, and its textural details match the depth of the story: a tale of love and exploration. The letters that begin each chapter evoke deep romance and allow the reader to share the authors sense of possibility. In the final chapters, time moves more quickly, and Scolniks growing sense of discovery brings wonderful closure to the story.

Alex Myers, author of Revolutionary and Continental Divide

Who hasnt dreamed of living a year in Paris? Scolnik lived that dream when she was 20, and brings us inside the exhilaration and heartaches of first love, observing her relationship with Luc in such rich detail that she makes it both unique and universal.

Michael Blanding, author of North by Shakespeare and The Map Thief

Paris Blue

by Julie Scolnik

Copyright 2021 Julie Scolnik

ISBN 978-1-64663-469-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any otherexcept for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

Cover art by Marcelo Lavalln

Published by

3705 Shore Drive

Virginia Beach, VA 23455

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www.koehlerbooks.com

ONE

Paris. June 1977

Dear Julie,

This letter wont reach you for days. When it does, I hope that you will have regained your equilibrium. As for me, I am sinking like a ship in a storm. Yesterday after you left, I lived through one of the most difficult days of my life. My body was knotted, as if, at 1:30, when your plane took off, all the existential anguish that you knew how to appease, surprised me again with more force, more tenacity.

Paris seems absurd. Yesterday, so as not to struggle against invincible forces, I drove down both rue Brown-Squard and rue Bonaparte, willing you to appear. Please send me as much as you can about your life back home. You know where I work and live. But I can only try to imagine you in this vast unknown, and it s unbearable .

Luc

PARIS. SEPTEMBER 1976EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER.

Perched on my toes, I peered over the upright piano and frowned at the fat gold Buddha wedged behind it. My elbow had inadvertently sent it flying while I was unpacking my music and Id watched its rotund belly sail across the smooth dark wood and disappear with a thud. I wondered if Madame Cammas would even notice it was missing, and considered leaving it there until I left Paris the following June. It wasnt mine, after all, and I was scheming to decorate my room as I always had since I was ten years oldwith pretty things that reminded me of home. Like my twelve Japanese rice paper woodcuts of the calendar months that had migrated from summer music camps to all my dorm rooms at Exeter and Wesleyan, each time animating an entire wall with vibrant color and whimsy. It would only be a matter of time before a cluster of rainbow-colored origami cranes would hover delicately over my bed. But the unexpected discovery of a piano in my own bedroomeven an old out-of-tune upright with antique yellow keysconvinced me that finding this lodging was fortuitous.

A few months earlier, when I was tracking down a room to rent in Paris for my junior year abroad, I was connected through my French Exeter roommate to a museum curator who rented a room each year to a student. A curator! I imagined shed live in a grandiose limestone building built during the Belle poque, her apartment filled with records, books, and paintings. What would I wear when she invited me to the opera?

But the day I arrived in Paris, my taxi turned instead onto a tiny, quiet street in the fifteenth arrondissement and stopped in front of 9, rue Brown-Squard. Not one of the majestic Haussmann buildings I had read about, but charming nonetheless, with a very respectable entrance and characteristic black ironwork balustrades defining the upper floor windows.

I had slid out crisp new francs to pay the taxi driverbills featuring stunning, colored portraits of Debussy, Berlioz, Czanne, and Saint-Exupryeven the money in France was artistic! I hobbled toward the entrance with my heavy bags and rang an oversized black bell. A dour guardienne, who bore an uncanny resemblance to the housekeeper in Rebecca , appeared and grimly indicated Madame Cammas ground-floor apartment just inside the foyer to the right. I knocked twice before a stooped, boulder-bosomed elderly lady opened the door. Her wide mouth was turned up in a clownish smile, and layers of thin, crinkly skin draped her eyes. A mass of gray hair was pinned randomly on her head, and a shapeless print dress hung low to her lumpy calves.