Breathless An American Girl in Paris

In the early 1960s, most middle-class American women in their twenties had their lives laid out for them: marriage, children, and life in the suburbs. Most, but not all.

Breathless is the story of a girl who represents those who rebelled against conventional expectations. Paris was a magnet for those eager to resist domesticity, and like many young women of the decade, Nancy K. Miller was enamored of everything French—from perfume and Hermès scarves to the writing of Simone de Beauvoir and the New Wave films of Jeanne Moreau. After graduating from Barnard College in 1961, Miller set out for a year in Paris, with a plan to take classes at the Sorbonne and live out a great romantic life inspired by the movies.

After a string of sexual misadventures, she gave up her short-lived freedom and married an American expatriate who promised her a lifetime of three-star meals and five-star hotels. But her husband wasn't who he said he was, and she eventually had to leave Paris and her dreams behind.

This stunning memoir chronicles a young womans coming-of-age tale, and offers a glimpse into the intimate lives of girls before feminism.

"This cautionary memoir of a girl's fantasy adventure in Paris gone awry reads like a witty novel. Its vivid scenes are frequently hilarious, sometimes sad, and always engrossing. That it really happened only makes it better."

—Alix Kates Shulman, author of To Love What Is

“A real-life Dud Avocado, this memoir is a provocative account of a feminist scholars sexual awakening set amid the backdrop of 1960s Paris.”

—Library Journal

“Millers memoir will resonate with women who, over the years, have been fascinated by Jean Sebergs role as Patricia in the Godard film Breathless (1960) . . . Her look back is filled with vintage vignettes of garret apartments, matronly concierges, and the silk-lingerie splurges of a poor young students milieu.”

—Booklist

“Breathless, a deliriously satisfying account of erotic awakening and disillusionment, unfolds as a chain of tightly crafted, riveting vignettes, each episode as mesmerizing as the city enshrined at the books center. Simone de Beauvoir would have loved this story. Jean-Paul Sartre, too. But Nancy K. Miller is more entertaining than both of them put together. Her book offers a beautifully distilled parable about the difficulties of finding a direct path to happiness.”

—Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Andy Warhol

"This cautionary memoir of a girl's fantasy adventure in Paris gone awry reads like a witty novel. Its vivid scenes are frequently hilarious, sometimes sad, and always engrossing. That it really happened only makes it better."

—Alix Kates Shulman, author of To Love What Is

"A steamy portrait of the jeune fille before she became a feminist. A wonderful reminder of what it meant to be a good daughter determined to become a bad girl in the roiling sixties. I loved every chapter of this Americans sex-obsessed quest for identity in Paris."

—Susan Gubar, author of Memoir of a Debulked Woman

"Witty, wise, poignant, and funny, Breathless is an extraordinary memoir about a young womans adventures and misadventures in Paris, a city that was for her as much an idea as a place. Millers vividly told memories, keen intelligence, gentle irony, and striking gift for narrative pacing held me captive from beginning to end."

—Siri Hustvedt, author of What I Loved and The Summer Without Men

"Surprising, daring, funny, wise, and profound."

—Elaine Showalter, author of A Jury of Her Peers

“Breathless, Nancy Miller's wry and wonderful new memoir about a romantic (and chastening) student sojourn she spent in Paris in the early 1960s, is a delicious, picaresque, often hilarious female 'coming of age' story—full of zest and pathos and more than a few glints of Proustian profondeur. . . . [Miller] offers a story at once salutary, intelligent, deeply humorous, and ineluctably bittersweet: the souvenir of a magical mise-en-scène, from a brilliant young woman who paid attention to it all.”

—Terry Castle, author of The Professor and Other Writings

"An artful portrait of youthful indiscretion in a bygone time."

—Bustle

After graduating from Barnard College, Nancy K. Miller sailed to Paris to study French literature and complete a masters degree. Already in love with the city from movies and novels, she hoped to create a new, more sophisticated identity for her twenty-year-old, nice-New York-Jewish-girl self. Several years of adventures and misadventures later, including marriage to an American ex-pat, Miller returned to New York minus the husband but ready to reinvent herself as an academic and writer.

Now a well-known feminist scholar, Miller has authored and edited more than a dozen books, publishing literary criticism, personal essays, and family memoirs. Her most recent memoir, What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, won the Jewish Journal Prize for 2012 and told the story of her quest to recreate her familys lost history. She is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches classes in memoirs, graphic novels, and womens studies. Miller lectures widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is anthologized in popular volumes on autobiography and collections of feminist essays. She also co-edits Columbia University Presss Gender and Culture series, which she co-founded in 1983 with the late Carolyn Heilbrun.