Pamela Druckerman

If you had asked me what I wanted when I was 12 years old, I probably would have said, 'To marry a plastic surgeon.' You can hardly blame me: I was growing up in Miami.

French schools follow a national curriculum that includes arduous surveys of French philosophy and literature. Frenchmen then spend the rest of their lives quoting Proust to one another, with hardly anyone else catching the references.

Teach your kids emotional intelligence. Help them become more evolved than you are. Explain that, for instance, not everyone will like them.

Practically every time I speak up at a school conference, a political event, or my apartment building association's annual meeting, I'm met with a display of someone else's superior intelligence.

When you're further along in your career, you probably have more money and more means; you have to stop yourself from giving your child too much. Whereas, if you're in twenties, you might just get by.

Not many foreigners move to Paris for their dream job. Many do it on a romantic whim.

Soccer may not explain the world or even contain the world. But it makes the world a slightly happier place.

Optimism - even, and perhaps especially in the face of difficulty - has long been an American hallmark.

I hear people in their 20s describe the 40s as a far-off decade of too-late, when they'll regret things that they haven't done. But for older people I meet, the 40s are the decade that they would most like to travel back to.

Podcasts immersed me in colloquial English and put me back in the American zeitgeist.

When I was 41, I had a very bad back pain, and it turned out to be Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

If you want to know how old you look, just walk into a French cafe. It's like a public referendum on your face.