Bonjour, Au Revoir (I Am Finally, Finally French)

A hilarious and heartfelt memoir of embracing life in rural France.

At 47, Mark Greenside, a glass-is-half-empty native New Yorker living in California, unwillingly went to Brittany, and to his great amazement and surprise fell in love with the place and its people. Then, because love makes you crazy and do crazy things, he borrowed money from his mom and bought a 120-year-old farmhouse in Plobien, a village of 500 people. Thus began Mark’s bumbling, hilarious journey adapting to life in rural France. From navigating unwritten rules about touching tomatoes at the market to hosting dinners for discerning friends, every mishap and cultural and linguistic misunderstanding--of which there were many--became a lesson in resilience, perseverance, compliance, and humility.
Now, three decades later, Mark reflects on the unforeseen joys and challenges of growing older in the place he calls home every summer. With his trademark wit and self-awareness, he reveals how his life in Plobien--and his friends’ and neighbors’ enduring patience and kindness--have shaped him into something he never thought he’d become: truly, deeply, finally French.
Both a love letter to Brittany and a meditation on life’s unpredictability, I Am Finally, Finally French is an invitation to laugh, learn, and savor the beauty of embracing change--no matter how daunting it seems.

Mark Greenside has been a civil rights activist, Vietnam War protestor, anti-draft counselor, VISTA Volunteer, union leader, and college professor. His stories have appeared in the Sun, the Literary Review, Cimarron Review, the Nebraska Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, the New Laurel Review, Crosscurrents, Five Fingers Review, and the Long Story, as well as other journals and magazines, and he is the author of a short story collection, I Saw a Man Hit His Wife. and two previous memoirs about life in France, I’ll Never Be French (No Matter What I Do), and (Not Quite) Mastering the Art of French Living. He resides in Alameda, CA, and Brittany, France.