Paris Was the Place

About Susan Conley

Susan Conley lived in Beijing for over two years, and returned to Portland, Maine, with her husband and two sons in December 2009. She is cofounder of the Telling Room, a writer’s workshop and literary hub for the region. Before this, she worked as an associate editor at Ploughshares and led creative writing and literature seminars at Emerson College in Boston. Her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and other literary magazines. She is currently working on a novel and settling back into life in the States.

Praise

“Susan Conley's Paris Was the Place has the kind of emotional weight you hope for in a novel. Its world, by turns achingly beautiful and brutally unjust, is as vividly rendered as its characters, whose joys and struggles we embrace as our own.” —Richard Russo

“Paris Was the Place is a gorgeous love story and a wise, intimate journal of dislocation that examines how far we'll go for the people we love most.  I couldn't put it down.” —Ayelet Waldman, author of Red Hook Road and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

“Paris Was the Place, with its portrait of Paris in the 80’s and a narrator whose beloved brother is undone by AIDS, renders viscerally just how the personal becomes the political, and vice-versa: it’s beautifully eloquent on the shortfall we so keenly feel between the comfort and support we can offer loved ones and the comprehensive safety we wish we could provide.  It reminds us through the openheartedness of its compassion of the infinity of ways in which doing what we can for others might represent the best we can do in terms of saving ourselves.” —Jim Shepard, author of You Think That’s Bad and Like You’d Understand, Anyway

“In Paris Was the Place Susan Conley has created a vivid portrait of a place and a person. As Willow falls in love, first with the girls she teaches at a detention centre and then with the immigration lawyer charged with helping them, her life becomes increasingly complicated. The result is a suspenseful story, full of moral choices and deep feeling. Willow is an irresistible heroine.” —Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy and The House on Fortune Street

“Sensual and seductive, Paris Was the Place pulls you in and doesn't let you go. Find your nearest chair and start reading. With her poet's eye, Conley has woven a vivid, masterful tale of love and its costs.” —Lily King, author of Father of the Rain and The English Teacher

“Smart and compulsively readable, Paris Was the Place is a bittersweet meditation on responsibility and family, and on the power of words to save us.” —Maryanne O’Hara, author of Cascade