Title:French
Illusions : My Story as an American Au Pair in the Loire Valley
Author: Linda Kovic-Skow france booktours French-illusions
Author: Linda Kovic-Skow
“Je suis américaine . Je ne parle pas français” Linda Kovic-Skow began her journey to France in the summer of 1979. Simply awesome. As Linda
shares her enchanting story as an
au pair in a French household and
her wonderful adventure in Tours, I wish I could travel back in time as I have
always harboured the dream of spending some months in France in order to be
able to fully immerse myself in
the French language. While snapping a photo of a scene or a moment may be an efficient way to help us recall the
scene and remember the sequence of events, we still need to keep some kind of
journal and jot down some notes about the experience including details of a
particular place and a specific encounter. Ms Kovic-Skow definitely has kept the
memory of her travelling experiences to France with such clarity and the places and sights in Tours
as accurate as possible as she recounted the time she spent in France. Linda
might have changed the names of everyone she met in France and the name of the town she lived in as an au pair, nonetheless her dream like adventure has come across heart warming and truthful. It reminds me of the quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry “Fais de ta vie un rêve, et d'un
rêve, une réalité.” ―Make your life a dream and
the dream a reality.
When Linda was twenty –one, she worked as a
medical assistant for a busy family practice clinic in Seattle. When she grew
increasingly disenchanted with her mundane work, she decided to pursue a career
as a flight attendant. She imagined herself ‘ on sojourns in cities around the
globe, meeting fascinating people and living life to its fullest’. There was
one hitch in her pursuit of her
dream job. At the interview with World Airways, she was told that all flight attendants
had to be bilingual. The interviewer suggested “Spanish, French , or German.”
French appealed to
Linda so she decided that total immersion would be the best way to
become fluent in the shortest amount of time. A coworker suggested that she could
become an au pair for a family in France. She decided to take up the challenge
as an au pair that usually entails childcare, twenty- five to thirty hours a
week along with some light housework and cooking and in return she would have
her own bedroom, a small allowance and one day off per week. Again there was
another snag. The agencies required prospective au pairs to be conversant in
French. Linda was determined so she filled out the applications as though she
spoke basic French when in
reality, she did not. She found a
family in Songais within the Loire region of
France. The family she was going to work for lived in Château de
Montclair , a real – life castle
in Songais and the couple had two young children and the third one was
on its way. The Dubois family who engaged her was
surprised to find that she spoke very little French. However they decided to
let her stay as they were expecting their third child. She
soon found that her inability to communicate in French did pose a barrier
between her and the children who were under her charge.
When Linda first met her employer, Madame Dubois , a tall, statuesque woman, she asked. “Parlez-
vous anglais?”. That probably did not kick off on a good ground. When Madame Dubois knew that Linda could only manage a few French phrases, she was definitely not amused. Life as an au pair posed several challenges. However during her stay in Tours, she had made new friends who
were kind and helpful. When she was overwhelmed with frustrations, she had also experienced kindness, abundance of joy and happy encounters.
Written in the first person voice, Ms
Kovic- Skow’s memoir is a captivating read and I cannot wait to read
her next book entitled “From Tours to Paris ( French Illusions Book 2)