Kiss Me Again, Paris

“ Paris has been many things for lesbians: an escape, an entryway, a refuge for artists and expatriates, a realization of lives lived more openly and freely. This is what Renate Stendhal vividly brings to the fore with her memoir, Kiss Me Again, Paris which follows her lesbian life and desires in Paris in the 1970s.
Having escaped her confining life in Germany where she was raised, Stendhal comes to Paris where she works as a cultural journalist and immerses herself in the art scene there. This move is an endeavor in self-preservation and self-sovereignty: a freeing of her self from the suffocating grasp of German rules and social mores, of attempts to force her into the patriarchal coffin of domesticity by being defined by the roles of wife and mother. Stendhal flees this dead life paraded to her as her future and instead seizes Paris with its freedom, dynamism, eroticism, and the chance it gives outsiders to reinvent themselves.
With a personal and absorbing writing style, Stendhal immerses us in the heady days of Parisian dyke life and culture in the 1970s. She makes one feel the chemistry and energy of this time, the erotic excitement of lesbians finding and relating to one another – in cafes and clubs, at parties, and in lecture halls. We are drawn into the colorful stories of women from her past like artist Meret Oppenheim and writer Monique Wittig. These retellings are personal, notable, and intriguing.
At the center of Stendhal’s story is a love triangle of sorts – including an obsession with a lover who plays hot/cold and a mysterious stranger who captivates her and brings the past and present together in unanticipated ways. In addition to passion and desire, one also sees the dysfunctional dynamics in these relationships — the obsessive/compulsive tendencies that lesbians sometimes play out and the ways in which such sexual relating can be a way to avoid the risk of love, especially its vulnerability and exposure. Through Stendhal’s telling, one sees the stage of lesbian desire, but in the end it’s about working to remove the masks we often wear, seeing the vulnerabilities of who we are and how the past follows us even when we feel we have left it behind.
Illustrated with Stendhal’s own vintage photographs, Kiss Me Again, Paris is an engrossing memoir that shares the contours of a lesbian’s life and shows how a place like Paris can shape and permeate that life in profound ways.
 
Published in Rain and Thunder Issue 75: Summer 2020.”

“I had the chance of a lifetime to spend ten days in Hawaii at a friend’s house in Kauai this past summer, and my prime, choice for literary companionship was Renate Stendhal Kiss Me Again, Paris. In escaping to an idyllic setting, I wanted a book that was nothing less than an equivalent paradise of gorgeous sentences perfectly timed to the entrances and exits of a story’s characters. As a bildungsroman of an outsider who secures her place in a youthful microcosm of perspicacious romantic attraction, Stendhal’s memoir manages to exceed the glow of its backdrop by reviving each instance of the author’s recollections as if they breathed again in an ineluctable encounter with palpable imagination.”

“[Stendhal’s] memoir is notable for a variety of reasons: it’s a window into the gay female melee of the moment, and she has a particular way of recalling her encounters with luminaries. Some she names outright, like Meret Oppenheim and Pina Bausch; others’ identities she keeps under wraps. It’s a tactic that places the book in a category Stendhal playfully refers to as memoir à clef, a twist on the roman à clef: a novel with ‘keys’ to uncovering the real in the fictional.”

“Renate Stendhal’s daring new book throbs with the pulse of Paris in the 1970s. We follow the adventures of a young German journalist as she covers the art scene and keeps an eye open for romance with other women. Written with verve, this book captures the sense of erotic excitement that Paris continues to inspire.”

“The thing about Renate Stendhal, for the reader of this book, is that she feels Paris in every fiber of her being. And she is able to carry the reader with her into all these delicious places, some well known and some known to few. The great thing is to relax and let her take you. It is a memorable journey.”