Like Bouras, Sarah Turnbull, the author of Almost French, writes as the resident of another country. Formerly an SBS television reporter, Turnbull moved to Europe as a freelance journalist in the early 1990s. She went to France initially to visit a Frenchman whom she had met in Bucharest, and eventually made her home with him in Paris. In writing about her life there, Turnbull sometimes resorts to generalisations about ‘the French’, commenting for example on a national tendency for sober self-criticism alongside a ‘glaringly Gallic’ quality.^[15] Her writing shares something of the spirit of satirical travel guidebooks such as the ‘Xenophobe’ series, which, unlike much contemporary academic scholarship in the humanities, are not concerned with avoiding essentialism. Turnbull’s memoir, however, reflects tellingly on aspects of the relationship between self, language and culture brought to the fore by her experience of living as a foreigner in France. Her most effective writing probes and dramatises differences in expected ways of thinking and behaving that emerge from her conversations with French speakers.

A memorable encounter occurs at a cocktail party in Paris. It strikes Turnbull that the other guests are ‘hanging back’, none willing ‘to break the ice’. She portrays herself trying to ‘bridge’ the ‘cool distance’ by introducing herself:

This comically one-sided conversation reveals not only that ‘the rules’ for conversation might be different in the new context, but that getting to know others at a party is not, for the couple Turnbull approaches, the self-evident good that it is for her. One of the strengths of Turnbull’s portrayal of French society is the way she captures the diversity of social worlds—not all French gatherings are like this—yet also how styles of interaction that she has grown up with in Sydney don’t easily find a purchase in any of the varied social spaces into which she ventures in France.

As Barbara Hanna and Juliana de Nooy point out in a recent paper, Turnbull inverts a convention of anglophone travel writing about France where the spotlight is on the strange or amusing habits of the French, emphasising rather the comic qualities of the figure she cuts herself in French society.^[17] Through the medium of Turnbull and Frédéric’s post-mortem discussions about what went wrong in her social encounters, the memoir creates a symbolic bridging of the gap between the Australian interloper and her wary, deprecating French audience. We see Frédéric becoming aware that behaviour that seems natural could be culturally inflected, a parallel development to the one that Turnbull herself undergoes.

While she presents her struggles to communicate in a comic light, Turnbull also brings out her frustrated feeling of invisibility in the new language and culture. This is partly a matter of limited vocabulary, but her dislocation is linguistic in a deeper sense, in that cultural expectations about behaviour make themselves felt through underlying scripts for what can or cannot be said, scripts that are largely lost on her. At a reunion lunch for university friends of Frédéric, the hosts seem to ignore her. When another couple greet her warmly—‘Enfin, le kangarou!’—she feels she could weep with gratitude. Their friendliness, however, which she experiences as a reviving touch of normality, turns out in this cultural context to be an idiosyncratic response. None of Frédéric’s other friends at the lunch feel bound to come up with it. Marie, a stylish woman with whom Turnbull has been trying to chat in French, turns suddenly to Frédéric and asks: ‘“Et ta petite copine, comment va son français?” Her words ring across the table, loud and patronising. (“How’s your little girlfriend’s French coming along?”)’ Frédéric, embarrassed, tries to include Turnbull: ‘Er, I think she can probably answer that herself.’ Faced with what seems like a gratuitous insult and unable to formulate a retort in French, Turnbull takes refuge in the bathroom, crying with mortification.^[18]

From the retrospective vantage point of several more years in France, Turnbull reads the incident differently. She suggests that in French, Marie’s comment, while hardly kindly meant, would not necessarily have been calculated to wound; that in the middle-class, urban French milieu of the lunch, there was no particular expectation of friendliness towards newcomers. Two years later, Turnbull is on good terms with Marie. The hosts of the lunch who appeared so cold ultimately turn out to be ‘fun and gregarious’. Asked about their initial unfriendliness, they observe: ‘The problem is the French aren’t very comfortable meeting new people…For us, friendships form over years, at school or university. And after that, we’re not interested, we’re no longer curious. We think we’ve got enough friends already.’ For Turnbull, this explanation is ‘somehow healing’ because, as she writes, ‘even though that lunch was more than two years ago now, the cool reception, those unreciprocated what-do-you-do’s, my anger, the hurt, had all accumulated in a knot which needed untangling’.^[19]