When my kids correct my cultural missteps, I sometimes suspect that they're not embarrassed, they're gleeful.
The overarching conventional wisdom - what everyone from government experts to my French girlfriends take as articles of faith - is that restrictive diets generally don't make you healthier or slimmer. Instead, it's best to eat a variety of high-quality foods in moderation and pay attention to whether you're hungry.
Soon after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I got a letter from France's interior ministry informing me that I was now French. By the time it arrived, I'd been French for nearly two weeks without even knowing it.
When we're in the U.S., my kids instantly start snacking all the time. I don't know how it happens. There is just more food available all the time. There aren't all these little different varieties of snack foods in France.
Just do what you want more often. Don't be so worried about what other people expect.
As an American married to an Englishman and living in France, I've spent much of my adult life trying to decode the rules of conversation in three countries. Paradoxically, these rules are almost always unspoken.
Not many foreigners move to Paris for their dream job. Many do it on a romantic whim.
Optimism - even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty - has long been an American hallmark.
The French view is really one of balance, I think... What French women would tell me over and over is, it's very important that no part of your life - not being a mom, not being a worker, not being a wife - overwhelms the other part.
The question on my husband's birthday is always, What do you get for the man who has nothing?
In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.
Podcasts immersed me in colloquial English and put me back in the American zeitgeist.
Usually, I'm so self-absorbed that my companion could be bleeding to death, and I might not notice.
I think, in writing a memoir, you kind of give order to your life.
There's this idea in America that you can be whatever you want. That remains an ideal in terms of how you dress too - when you go shopping, you try on all possible selves and then decide.
When you're the foreigner and your kids are the natives, they realize you're clueless much sooner than they ordinarily would. I'm pretty sure mine skipped the Mommy-is-infallible stage entirely.
The whole point of a commencement speech is to say something encouraging.
When I moved to Europe 12 years ago, my biggest concern was whether I'd ever speak decent French. Practically every American I knew came to visit, many saying they dreamed of living here, too.
In the Nineties, there was all this new research into brain development, with evidence saying poor kids fall behind in school because no one is talking to them at home, no one is reading to them. And middle-class parents seized on this research.
It's refreshing to have some time off from wondering whether I look fat.