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WORK TITLE: Amour Provence
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.constanceleisure.com/
CITY: Provence
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: American
Lives in Provence, France, and Litchfield, Connecticut. * http://www.simonandschuster.com/authors/Constance-Leisure/525853866
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2015059538
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2015059538
HEADING: Leisure, Constance
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053 _0 |a PS3612.E35925
100 1_ |a Leisure, Constance
670 __ |a Amour Provence, 2016: |b ECIP t.p. (Constance Leisure)
PERSONAL
Married; children: two.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, editor, and novelist. Began career as an editor at Ladies Home Journal and Family Circle magazines.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Constance Leisure began her career as a writer and magazine editor in New York. In 1990 she moved with her husband and two small children to Paris, France. They eventually took a trip to Provence to buy wine and ended up also buying an old farmhouse in the small wine village of Vaucluse in Provence. Leisure had been writing since she was a teenager but did not begin to write fiction seriously until she and her family moved to France. She wrote three novels that took place in the United States that were never published before deciding to base a novel on her experiences in France, ultimately titled Amour Provence: A Novel.
In an interview with the Day Online contributor Amy J. Berry, Leisure noted:”It suddenly clicked what I’d absorbed about living in the south of France—the vineyards, vintners and the way they live and present their wines; the neighbors who have certain ways of inviting people over for meals that last for four hours; and how important the natural world is, especially in the south, where people are connected with the land. After writing all those dreary American stories, this story was really anchored in something real.” Leisure went on in the interview to note that her inspiration for the novel came from what people told her in the small village in France where she and her family lived. She pointed to one story from an older neighbor about how the Nazis took over her house in 1944 when the woman was only fourteen years old. The story led Leisure to begin reading about France’s occupation during the war.
Leisure’s debut, Amour Provence, takes place in the small farm town of Serret, France, and another nearby village. It focuses on the town’s various residents and the interconnectedness of their lives. In addition, as noted by a Mystica Web site contributor: “Interspersed with the complicated lives of the people of the midi [southern France] is also the descriptiveness of this bleak but beautiful countryside.” The story covers seven decades from the time of the Nazi occupation of France during World War II. Didier Falque is a high school teenager who is in love with Berti Perra, a privileged girl from the family who owns the Domaine Pettijean vineyard. However, Didier ends up being seduced by a schoolmate’s mother, leading to lasting consequences for both of them, including Didier’s divorce years later. Euphemia is an older woman who went through the Nazi occupation relatively unscathed only to face treachery by her own daughter when she is committed to a nursing home. Other characters include Hamidou, a Moroccan immigrant and widower, Lapin, a hero during World War II who now lives like a mountain man, and Jeannot and his difficult teenage son, Auri.
Leisure reveals that life in Provence may seem ideal in many ways but living in a small, rural community also has its drawbacks, especially in terms of people looking askance at others who deviate from the norm. For example, a young Arab woman moves to the area believing she will have a better life only to realize that she is looked at differently by her neighbors, who are suspicious of anyone from the Middle East. Furthermore, she remains dominated by her husband. Another woman who left the town years earlier returns after her marriage to a Scottish man ends. She, too, is looked at askance by her neighbors and even her own family, including her brother, who worries that her return may impact his inheritance.
“At times this is a fascinating exploration of rural dynamics–particularly given the class, race, and cultural divisions in the story,” wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. A contributor to the Historical Novel Society Web site remarked: “Leisure paints an inviting picture, small-town warts and all.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, May 2, 2016, review of Amour Provence: A Novel, p. 30.
ONLINE
Constance Leisure Home Page, http://www.constanceleisure.com (March 15, 2017).
Day Online (Litchfield, CT), http://www.theday.com/ (July 19, 2016), Amy J. Barry, “Lots of Food, Wine and Drama in Amour Provence,” author interview.
Hickory Stick Bookshop Web site, http://www.hickorystickbookshop.com/ (March 15, 2017), “Meet the Author for Lunch–Constance Leisure–Amour Provence.“
Historical Novel Society, https://historicalnovelsociety.org/ (March 15, 2017), review of Amour Provence.
Mystica, https://musingsfromsrilanka.blogspot.com/ (September 15, 2016), review of Amour Provence.
Constance Leisure was a writer and magazine editor in New York before moving to France in 1990 with her husband and two small children. On a trip to Provence they fell in love with and purchased a tumbledown farmhouse that, over the years, has become the center of her creative life.
Constance Leisure
Constance Leisure began her career as an editor at Ladies Home Journal and Family Circle before moving to Paris with her husband and two young children who were raised and educated there. Early on, while on a trip to Provence to fill up the trunk of the family car with wine, they stumbled upon and purchased an old farmhouse with an enchanted garden in a small wine village in the Vaucluse. Little by little, the house in Provence became the center of her family life and her creative imagination. She lives there and in Litchfield, Connecticut. Amour Provence is her first novel.
Constance Leisure began her career as an editor at Ladies Home Journal and Family Circle before moving to Paris with her husband and two young children who were raised and educated there. Early on, while on a trip to Provence to fill up the trunk of the family car with wine, they stumbled upon and purchased an old farmhouse with an enchanted garden in a small wine village in the Vaucluse. Little by little, the house in Provence became the center of her family life and her creative imagination. She lives there and in Litchfield, Connecticut. Amour Provence is her first novel.
Amour Provence
Publishers Weekly.
263.18 (May 2, 2016): p30.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Amour Provence
Constance Leisure. Simon & Schuster, $16 trade paper (272p) ISBN 978-1-5011-2228-6
In the small farm town of Serret, France, everyone shares a history. No matter how far their respective paths may diverge, the residents of Serret--
most of whom have lived there all their lives--are wrapped together by family feuds, torrid affairs, and gossip. Didier and Gilberte are two young
friends who learn this the hard way, coming back together after years apart and reckoning with the consequences of their past as they try to carve
out a future in a town that never forgets. Debut author Leisure strikes a smart balance between the private and the public, ruminating at length on
the ways the two spheres bleed together. Each chapter allows the reader to straddle the public/ private line, witnessing an affair that must be kept
secret or domestic tension in an immigrant family. But the central narrative is difficult to keep track of as the focus jumps from family to family.
The book is structured as a series of stories that illustrate the interconnectedness of Serret, and the plot gets lost in colorful language that,
although evocative of place, often obscures characterization and stifles momentum. At times this is a fascinating exploration of rural dynamics--
particularly given the class, race, and cultural divisions in the story--but in the end, the novel, much like its characters, falters under the weight of
such a picturesque town. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Amour Provence." Publishers Weekly, 2 May 2016, p. 30. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA452883969&it=r&asid=1ce0642063cfe124d9ab178c5659f7b4. Accessed 6 Feb.
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A452883969
Amour Provence
BY CONSTANCE LEISURE
Find & buy on
Amour Provence begs to be read on a warm, sun-drenched patio scented with lavender, surrounded in soft cushions, with a glass of vendange tardive in easy reach. Author Constance Leisure is an American who has lived with her family in a small wine village in Provence for many years and this, appropriately, is her love letter to the region, the culture, and the people.
The novel loosely follows several sets of intersecting families, friends, neighbors, and rivals through years as their lives and fortunes converge, separate, and converge again in the wine-making towns of Serret and Beaucastel. As with all small towns, the good and bad is that everyone knows everyone else – and knows all of their business. We meet high-school-age Didier Falque, tongue-tied in his longing for beautiful and privileged Berti Perra of Domaine Pettijean vineyards, just as he is seduced into an affair with a schoolmate’s mother. We learn the story of Moroccan immigrant and widower Hamidou, as well as that of his dear friend, the aged Euphemie, who survived the treachery of Nazi occupation but can’t escape the treachery of a daughter who commits her to the clutches of a nursing home. Secret hero turned mountain man Lapin, artist and frustrated father Jeannot and his angry teenage son Auri, mean-spirited Manu Dombasle, Bertie and Didier – all take their roles in the stories that play out over the ancient, vineyard-covered hills of the Midi as the unceasing mistral blows. Leisure paints an inviting picture, small-town warts and all. Pour another glass of wine and enjoy.
Lots of food, wine and drama in ‘Amour Provence’
Published July 19. 2016
Amy J. Barry
Two small villages in Provence that produce fine wines and delectable dishes also serve up a cast of colorful characters with secrets and feuds, loves and losses in “Amour Provence,” a new novel by Constance Leisure.
Originally from New York, where she was a magazine editor, Leisure and her husband and young children moved to Paris 25 years ago, where she started writing fiction and nonfiction about daily life in France. Before long, while traveling the country, they came upon a charming old farmhouse in a small wine village in Provence, which they purchased. It became the inspiration for Leisure’s first published novel.
Leisure is now stateside, spending part of the summer in Litchfield in an old house left to her by her grandmother. She will give a talk and do a book signing at Bank Square Books in Mystic on July 27. The following is a recent Day interview with the author.
Q. As a baby boomer in a youth culture, you give us hope that it’s never too late to publish a first novel. Why did you wait until after you turned 60?
A. I was a writer since I was a teenager, but I started writing fiction more seriously in France. I wrote three novels that took place in the U.S. that were never published. This one took about three years to write. It suddenly clicked what I’d absorbed about living in the south of France — the vineyards, vintners and the way they live and present their wines; the neighbors who have certain ways of inviting people over for meals that last for four hours; and how important the natural world is, especially in the south, where people are connected with the land. After writing all those dreary American stories, this story was really anchored in something real.
Q. How and when did the characters and the storyline — spanning 70 years from the Nazi occupation — come to you? Are these eclectic characters based on people you know in France?
A. I was inspired by things people said, and they would stay in my mind and I would ruminate about them. One in particular was my elderly neighbor, who told me that the Nazis had occupied her house in 1944. She was about 14. I asked her what was it like living in a house occupied by Nazis at that tender age when she was just developing as a woman. She said they were ‘perfectly correct.’ In France that means just on the edge of being not perfectly correct. It must have been a rough time for her, but she didn’t want to go any further. I began reading books about France during the occupation — it developed in that way.
Q. You say that life in the south of France is often filled with drama, as reflected in your novel. Why is that?
A. People have an idea of Provence as ‘the land of milk and honey’ but it can be awfully rude in the summer, so hot you can’t go outside in the middle of the day and in winter absolutely bone-chilling mistral wind blows down from the north. And so people’s lives as a result are often quite dramatic, full of joy and full of difficulty — at the mercy of the elements … I didn’t realize until after I wrote the novel that each character is represented as a different permutation of life: sexual, maternal, paternal, platonic, love and love’s opposite at times, too — hatred.
Q. Wine and food play an important role in your novel. Is it because eating and drinking well — the local economy being based on wine — is so integral to life in Provence?
A. I think it’s part of that sensual life of France, being connected to the land, loving nature, and then wine and food just come naturally into that. In certain places where you make a fancy meal and it’s appreciated, these people don’t make such an effort on food and it’s an easy relaxed thing — a way of sharing with your neighbors, just like you share stories of your own life. People don’t guzzle wine so much as say, ‘Oh, I’d like you to try this wine by a neighbors who’s trying this new technique.’ It’s not so much drinking the wine as the aesthetics of it that you taste and appreciate.
There’s (also) a lot of home cooking. In the chapter where the woman comes home and smells her mother’s Daube de boeuf —a long-cooked beef stew with a little ‘extra’ — that can often start off a conversation at a meal with people talking about different ways their families make it and then segueing into politics and art and neighbors.
Q. Do you cook? What are your favorite dishes to cook/eat when you’re in Provence?
A. I’ve always been interested in cooking, but I learned a lot from French friends. We cook together a lot, and I also have some terrific French cookbooks. I cook with zucchini, eggplant and tomatoes. I often make ratatouille in different ways, and I love to make different eggplant dishes. We grill a lot when the weather is good. Marseilles is nearby and has a big fish market on an old port. A favorite is turbot, a large white fish like flounder, but bigger — cooked on the grill, which is great. There’s an African market in Marseilles that I like a lot also, where I get (ingredients) to make couscous. I like to make fish couscous or tangine. The way we love Chinese food (in the U.S.), the French love North-African food.
Q. What is the most important thing you learned about preparing food and eating well while living in France?
A. One of main things is the products are so good; when you buy a chicken, it’s real farm chicken that’s been eating in the fields and running around instead of a chicken raised with hundreds of chickens that never get out in the sunshine. That’s true of a lot of the produce, whether it’s lamb or beef. The vegetables are really good, most of the year. And people are willing to pay extra few euros for (such things as) a really good cheese.
Thursday, September 15, 2016
Amour Provence by Constance Leisure
Stories set in two time frames dealing with the same families are always good for me. Set in Provence during the time of the Nazi as well as much later the story outlines the lives of several people from the time they were youngsters as well as their parents and then goes on to the later scenario and how lives have changed/been unchanged.
In the vineyards and farms where the story is set, life is governed by what is seasonally done for generations. Also livelihoods have been passed from father to son. A variation in this set in stone lifestyle is not looked at well by either neighbours or the community at large. The return of a daughter after a broken marriage to a Scottish man is looked at askance, especially as her sibling feels that he may get deprived of his inheritance. A young Arab woman hoping for a life of freedom realises that she has escaped one constrictive life for another where everyone looks at her with suspicion and life is still governed by what her husband decides. A young man has an affair with the mother of another young man in the village, but the affair only comes back to bite him decades later and leads to his divorce and isolation.
Interspersed with the complicated lives of the people of the midi, is also the descriptiveness of this bleak, but beautiful countryside. The people seem at times harsh molded by the landscape they inhabit and this must influence the way they think and behave, but the story is compelling reading.
Strong characterization was another hallmark of this story which made for an interesting read.
Sent to me by Netgalley for an unbiased review courtesy of Simon & Schuster.
Posted by Mystica at 7:29 PM