Talking Bad Habits and French Film with Sophie Mas and Audrey Diwan of 'How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are'

How to Be Parisian Wherever You Are — the wry style manifesto by Anne Berest, Audrey Diwan, Caroline de Maigret and Sophie Mas — arrives in English this month, and two of its authors sat down with us to talk about the book's real subject, which is not scarves. It's self-invention.

Mas and Diwan both work in film (producing and screenwriting respectively), and the conversation kept swerving to cinema: the Parisienne of the book, they insist, is a character built by Godard's Anna Karina, Truffaut's Jeanne Moreau and forty years of actresses smoking meaningfully in doorways. 'We wrote a book about a fictional woman,' Diwan says, 'the way you'd write a great screen role.'

Their bad-habits chapter — be late, contradict yourself, own four of the same jacket — is a comic inversion of the American self-help shelf: a how-to that celebrates flaws instead of fixing them.

Diwan, then best known as a screenwriter, told us she was circling a directing debut 'about the body, about being a woman when it costs something.' She kept her word: her film Happening, adapted from Annie Ernaux's memoir, won the Golden Lion at Venice in 2021. We'd like to claim we saw it coming; mostly we just enjoyed the cigarettes-and-cinema talk.