“WHAT”'S CULTURE GOT TO DO WITH IT?”

One might hypothesise that the success of books about living in France is indicative of a strong desire among readers to know more about French culture, and to understand it better, and yet intercultural understanding tends not to be a major theme in the Australian memoirs. This chapter explores the difficulty of harnessing the genre of the life-in-France memoir to the task of facilitating cultural understanding. Certainly some of the authors endeavour to impart what they have learnt about France and the French through the time they have spent there. As might be expected, of course, what they have learnt has often been absorbed through an Australian filter. As discussed in Chapter 3, some of the authors encounter few Francophones, preferring to mingle with other Anglophone expatriates, perpetuating what Donald Morrison (referring to British books about the French) characterised as ‘a foreign literary industry that reduces the French to comic walk-on parts in the larger Anglo-Saxon narrative’ (2009, 15). A few, however, have gone so far as to allow their own worldview to be put into question as a result of a close and prolonged engagement with French cultural ways and beliefs. Among these is Sarah Turnbull, whose bestselling Almost French is interesting as much for its cultural lessons as for its strategies for imparting them.