Paris, 1978. Elaine Sciolino was a 29-year-old cub reporter for Newsweek, the junior member, and solely girl, in a bureau staffed by a lot older males. For assignments, she acquired the leftovers—“smooth” stuff, which in Paris principally meant meals and vogue. Newsweek occurred to share an workplace with The Washington Put up, and Sciolino’s first break got here when the paper’s legendary vogue editor Nina Hyde took her below her wing. Quickly she was attending prêt-à-porter reveals, assembly Yves Saint Laurent and his mannequin muses, eating at Karl Lagerfeld’s beautiful Left Financial institution residence. It was a glamorous introduction to journalism within the Metropolis of Gentle.
Then, her beat modified in a single day. An obscure Iranian cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini arrived within the quiet suburb of Neauphle-le-Château in exile, and not one of the senior correspondents needed to make the trek. However Sciolino was sport. Armed with allure, persistence, and chutzpah, she grew to become the primary girl—and first American—to interview the ayatollah. When the revolution erupted in Tehran, Newsweek selected her to board Khomeini’s chartered flight again to Iran. She took together with her $20,000 in money, a shortwave radio, a conveyable typewriter in a blue eggshell case, and one change of clothes.
“I used to be younger and silly and single,” she later advised Terry Gross, reflecting on the risks she disregarded as a girl journalist flying into the Islamic Revolution.
Sciolino ultimately joined The New York Occasions, the place she constructed a distinguished profession as United Nations bureau chief, CIA correspondent, and the paper’s first feminine chief diplomatic correspondent, amongst different roles. She later returned to Paris, this time to guide the Occasions bureau there through the George W. Bush years—the period of “Freedom Fries.” But Paris was now not only a skilled task; it will turn out to be her everlasting residence, and the throughline of her subsequent 4 books.
The primary was 2011’s La Séduction, a pointy evaluation of how seduction—not merely romantic but additionally mental, culinary, and political —infuses practically each side of French life. Whereas loads of People have written about what the French can train us (Bringing Up Bébé, French Girls Don’t Get Fats, and many others.), Sciolino’s was that uncommon e-book written by an American that French individuals might learn to grasp themselves. She adopted up its success with a bestselling portrait of her personal avenue, the Rue des Martyrs (2015’s The Solely Avenue in Paris), and 2019’s The Seine: The River That Made Paris, tracing the river from its legendary beginnings as a wellspring of Gallic tradition to its unlikely future as an Olympic swimming venue.
