It hasn’t escaped me that the title of this series is the same as the title of my blog: Emily in Paris / Juliet in Paris. As I simultaneously chuckled, yawned and groaned through the first episodes, I thought to myself: she could be me. Or rather, she could’ve been me back in the 1990s when I first arrived in Paris. (Only I don’t know how she’d survive without her smartphone.)

Like Emily who works in PR/marketing, I worked in France’s largest advertising agency before moving on to the Reuters Paris bureau. Like Emily who’s having all sorts of adventures, mishaps and romances, so did I. Isn’t that the reason one comes to Paris??  To be honest, my adventures were far more salty than hers. (Of course they were, I’m a Boomer, she’s a boring Millennial.) Did she end up – not once, but twice – in a French paddy wagon? Did she meet Omar Sharif in a Deauville restaurant? She wouldn’t know who Omar Sharif is. Did she have a torrid transatlantic affair with a New Yorker who would go on, years later, to become a BIG and well-known American documentary filmmaker? (In my heart, he will be forever referred to as “the one who got away.”)

Read the adventures of Juliet in Paris in my memoir, due out in 2021. I guess you could call it ‘a family memoir’ with a heavy emphasis on me, my adventures, mishaps and romances. Incidentally, that’s not the title of the book.

Emily in Paris has only recently arrived on French Netflix. But already the series has received a deluge of criticisms from French viewers. They complain that it’s studded with one cliché after the next. But y’know what? Some of those clichés are true!

https://www.vox.com/21502498/netflix-emily-in-paris-review-millennials

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/06/plenty-to-feel-insulted-about-french-critics-round-on-emily-in-paris