A SEASON FOR THAT

A delightful memoir told in transporting writing, humor, and delicious detail from award winning food writer Steve Hoffman

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. After studying abroad in Paris, he commits himself to not just learn perfect French, but to try to perfect being a Parisian - to look and sound and be the effortlessly stylish old men who hold their cigarettes chest high and spend all day in the café. He gets really good at it, but he puts off his dream of becoming a real Parisian to return to the life he's always known. Until one day he and his wife decide to take a chance and make a change and move the whole family to France for half a year. What follows is this story of how this family tries to break through what they just thought would be a great adventure to making a real life among their new neighbors. How Steve regrets going to this village almost instantly, because it's not actually his dream of what being French is, but how, slowly, through learning to cook and eventually become a winemaker with the locals, he understands that our perfect visions of ourselves have to be made, not slipped into. The book is full of nuanced character, and really rich prose - you feel the landscape and the place change as Steve resists it, then comes to understand it, then comes to love it. Steve Hoffman is a writer, tax preparer, and occasional French villager. He is the winner of an IACP Bert Greene Award for Narrative Culinary Writing, five Association of Food Journalism awards, and the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award at the James Beard Awards.