Paris Hangover » (First Edition)

Kirsten Lobe is a former fashion designer for Calvin Klein and Oscar de la Renta who also designed home furnishings sold in stores such as Barney and Neiman-Marcus. In 2002, she traded a 2,000 square foot Tribeca loft for a 550 square foot garret in Paris' St. Germain, where she still lives.

Klein is a New York fashionista with a great resume, a terrific boyfriend (on paper) and showstopping Tribeca triplex. She has trunk-fulls of fabulous footwear, but not the significant relationship she'd longed for—no, expected—to have by now. And there's something else: she's fou (that's crazy) for France, for French men, for la vie Francaise. Fleeing her Big Shot boyfriend and bidding adieu to it all, Klein starts over in Paris.

From a tiny walk-up in the 7th that she had to lie (in broken Franglais) to get, Klein plunges into the mysterious world of Gallic Men: the casually sexy Renaud, a prototypical Frenchman with a flute of Moet and a Galoise always at the read; trying to keep everybody straight when she dates three men named Jean at the same time; and a completely wrong Monsieur Married Aristocrat, who wants Klein for his very well-kept mistress.

An American in Paris never had life so good—Café Flore, painting in a garret, afternoons in the Jardins Luxembourg—or so bad. But Klein isn't going to get over her passion for France and it's men anytime soon. PARIS HANGOVER is a funny, fresh novel about trying on a new life for size—and about cherching le homme in the process.

"This is a witty mousse, yet it also is unsparing without cruelty, ambitious not vicious, chic without the inevitable creak of a writer trying too hard."—Jacquelyn Mitchard

Kirkus Reviews

An ex-New York fashion designer heads to the City of Light in search of love. Climbing onto Manhattan's A-list, Klein has accumulated the perfect loft space, a closet full of gorgeous duds and a debonair French boyfriend-somewhere along the way, she dropped her first name in a fit of extreme affectation. Klein counts exclusive fashion houses among her consulting clients and commands a top salary. But when she takes a moment to reflect upon her life, she's sobered to find that though her closet is full, her heart is empty. She wonders what happened to her dreams of having a family and becoming a painter. Paris is the answer to these nagging questions, she decides. So she packs up her belongings and her cat, Puccini, and jets off to reinvent herself in the City of Light. The cultural jet lag she suffers makes for some hearty chuckles. Klein has a habit of mutilating the French language and fumbling when it comes to French customs. On the hunt for the future father of her children, she quickly strings together a series of dead-end relationships. Running through the eligible-bachelor population of Paris, as well as her savings, she's forced to come to terms with her own failings. It's a joy to see Klein toss aside the all-night parties and blossom into a self-reliant woman. Lobe treats the reader to a fabulous tour of Paris and delivers mouth-watering passages about the glories of French cuisine. From the simple pleasure of a sunset along the Seine to the decadent treat of shopping on St.-Germain, this writer knows her setting. (In fact, Lobe is an erstwhile Calvin Klein designer who moved to Paris to pursue her artistic dreams.) Her prose could be tightened up, and the overgrowth ofparenthetical asides could be pruned, but these rookie mistakes don't seriously mar what is a strong debut. There's something for everyone in this witty novel: red-hot love scenes, glorious depictions of Parisian sights and a snappy story.