Leaving America Questionnaire #23
Alexander Hurst, journalist, author, 10th arrondissement
What drives Americans to leave home and settle elsewhere? That question has been on my mind for many years. This series, Leaving America, seeks to uncover the multitude of reasons and lessons learned—beginning with Americans in and around Paris. Become a paid subscriber to access this newsletter’s archives. You can read more of my thinking on this topic in this reported essay.
Few of the Americans in Paris I’ve come to know have a linguaphile love story as similar to my own as Alexander Hurst’s. Where we differ, however, is in our approach to financial risk. Broke and living in a cramped apartment in Paris in 2020, he took a massive gamble and invested what savings he had in high-risk options trading. He saw his earnings skyrocket before, well, they plummeted, costing him everything. His tale first appeared in The Guardian before it became the crux of his memoir, Generation Desperation, released earlier this year. He’s bounced back, however, and now covers politics and culture as a columnist for The Guardian as well as other international publications. What role does Paris play in the life he is carving out for himself? Find out below.
Where was the last place you lived in the U.S.?
Kind of a split between Cleveland, Ohio, where I grew up and where my parents still live, and so where I have the strongest ongoing connection, and Amherst, Massachusetts, where I went to undergrad at Amherst College, which is the last time I really lived in the US, versus just visiting.
Did you intend to leave permanently or was the move temporary?
I left for France (Strasbourg) at the end of undergrad in 2012 with the idea of genuinely learning French, going to graduate school in France, and more likely than not having some sort of international life.
Was there a pivotal moment when you knew your life would be best pursued elsewhere?
The year after I lived in Strasbourg, I went to southern Chad to work for an NGO. A few months into that experience, I was sure enough that I wanted to go back France that when I started applying to graduate schools, I decided to counteract my indecision by applying to only one graduate program (a dual Masters between Sciences Po and the London School of Economics), so that I would have nothing to choose between, and thus nothing to regret.
What sort of financial consideration did the move require, even if as a student initially? Does one need a plump savings account to make this work?
I had the absolute privilege of parents who had persistently squirreled money away into an education account, no loans from Amherst (which was one of the first colleges in the U.S. to remove loans and switch to grant-only funding in its financial aid packages), and on top of that, grants for graduate study from Amherst. That made the LSE year possible. Without that, I would have gone only to Sciences Po, which, even as an international student, is far more affordable than comparable institutions in the U.S.
At what age did you leave? Looking back, was that too soon or too late?
22, which was great for actually becoming deeply fluent in French, even if learning it as an adult still means always having an accent.
When did you know you'd made the right [or wrong] call?
Do we ever really know, for sure?
What does Paris offer you that your native home couldn’t and, perhaps, still can’t?
France is over-centralized in a way that’s not-so-beneficial for the country as a whole, but that makes Paris practically unparalleled as a city. There are really few places in the world that are at the center of almost every scene: academics and research, conferences, policy and government, music, cinema, literature and publishing, fashion, art, tech, healthcare, museums, food, outdoor festivals… The only thing Paris is missing is a coast, and deep nature. London is dense in this same type of way, maybe.
But in Paris, my life is truly bilingual. I have this (probably annoying) way of really using both languages in conversation, but it’s because I think I need both of them to feel like a complete person. French might not be my native language, but it is my language now. I can’t imagine living somewhere where I wasn’t debating politics in French, browsing through French books in bookstores, sitting on terraces at sunset with conversations happening in both languages, going to English and French standup comedy.
Losing French from my life would feel like I was being stripped of the most life-altering decision I ever made. I’m amused when I think of some early mistakes I made my first year of language courses in Strasbourg, like being at a restaurant and ordering “La salope de poulet” instead of “l’escalope de poulet”. (For the non Francophones, I tried to order “the slutty chicken” instead of the “chicken cutlet”). And then my idea of reaching the top of language fluency has kept progressing.
My bar for ‘final boss level’ of language integration used to be getting 90% of standup comedy in French without needing to ask a friend to explain a joke, because that requires social, cultural, and historical fluency as well as linguistic fluency; now I think the ‘final boss level’ might be the one I beat last summer (live panel discussion about US politics and Trumpism at Le Monde’s Festival International du Journalisme) or in January (discussing ICE and the rise of fascism in the US on a live-broadcast roundtable for a show on France 5, called En Société), but maybe it’s the one I’m currently at: writing a longform piece for a French magazine, La Revue21, organically in French.
Or maybe the only one that I can imagine coming after, which would be pulling the full Kundera and writing a book in French?
“Paris, the real, non-touristy version, is an onion, and as incredible as it is to peel away new layers, sometimes it also makes you cry.”— Alexander Hurst
Can you share any anecdotes about your highest and lowest moments in Paris?
Lowest: Paris has certainly seen me heartbroken more than once, and in those moments I’ve told myself that maybe there’s something artistic about letting this city absorb yet one more broken heart.
Highest: Refreshing the Journal Officiel de la République one day in late August, 2022, and seeing that I had officially become a French national. (And then going to pick up my passport).
But, you know Lindsey, one of your recent Instagram videos — where you mention Paris being a real place, and not simply a tourist’s sojourn — made me think twice about that. In my memoir Generation Desperation (ok, plugging my book, uhuh uhuh) I write about really struggling in my late 20s in this tiny, cramped flatshare, with the same financial and existential life problems as a ton of Millennials in major urban centers in the US have certainly experienced. With an early draft there was this bit of editorial feedback from someone in the U.S. whose reaction was, more or less, that the struggles that pushed me to all kinds of desperate financial behavior couldn’t really be that sympathetic because I was in Paris.
And I remember thinking, well, would that be the reaction if I were writing about how tough it was to find my footing in Brooklyn?
No doubt, Paris is this dream place for so many people. But it’s also just…a city. It’s a real place, where people are frazzled and busting their ass and exhausted on the horribly screechy line 13 at the end of an infuriating 300th day of metro-boulot-dodo (commute-work-sleep), and where far too many people are scraping by on salaries that most Americans would raise their eyebrows at (and not in a good way). The fact that it’s so romanticized in cinema and literature and in New York Times articles makes it hard for a lot of people to also think about it as a place that sometimes you can’t wait to get away from for a bit.
In a sense it shouldn’t be: just think about Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. But even the idea of struggling in Paris has this compelling, la vie en rose tint to it. Whereas Paris, the real, non-touristy version, is an onion, and as incredible as it is to peel away new layers, sometimes it also makes you cry.
Are there aspects of American life that you long for?
I miss the ease with which Americans are always striking up conversations with each other. Every time I wait at the gym for my HIIT class, people are waiting in relative silence and I always find myself thinking, “if this were Cleveland, there would be a lot of chit chat going on.”
What book or movie do you most associate with the American experience abroad?Hmm, it’s not necessarily the American experience abroad, but L’Auberge Espagnol had a lot of intersections with my own experience in Paris as a student.
If you had to narrow it down to one, what is the greatest lesson living abroad has taught you about yourself and the world?
That there really is an ‘Anglo-American’ way of thinking about the world that a lot of Americans assume (without even realizing it) is simply the way of conceptualizing the world. It’s not, it’s one of many.
Have you ever considered going back? (Why or why not)
No. Even if I wanted to move back to a disintegrating former democracy and live under a corrupt oligarchy in the making, being able to afford life as a writer in the U.S. seems inconceivable. Healthcare alone would eat up like half of my income.
For those contemplating leaving the U.S., what do you suggest they consider most about the decision?
The more you’re able to swap U.S. ways of operating for local ways of operating, the better your experience will be. For example, I had a friend who, years ago, kept complaining that he couldn’t find good produce here, which blew my mind because my own experience is that produce in much of the U.S. is giant, blemishless, and bland, compared to the explosively real taste of things in France. And eventually he told me that he did all his shopping at Monoprix (a big-box grocery store chain), instead of going to the green grocer, or taking advantage of the farmer’s markets that pop up in each Paris neighborhood at least once a week. And while some artisan stores of bio épiceries can absolutely be a bit pricey, I don’t find that to be the case with the local pop-up farmer’s markets. Certainly not in the northeast of the city. Especially if you’re eating seasonally.
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