Finding My Way Back to Words

Between Two Languages

Some have asked when I started writing.

In my twenties, I wrote. I was drawn to philosophy and even considered entering hypokhâgne, a French preparatory program for the competitive entrance examinations to institutions such as the École Normale Supérieure. My philosophy professor encouraged me to pursue it. I was fortunate to do well academically, in both literary subjects and science. That opened doors to some of France’s most selective institutions and gave me a choice of futures to explore.

I was pragmatic. I chose a career in science because I believed it would allow me to make a living and become a self-sufficient, independent woman. Philosophy seemed to demand something else entirely: not only dedication, but exceptional brilliance. Could I sustain that? Could I withstand its demands over time? I was not sure. It intimidated me. It scared me, even. So I chose the safer path.

Then life happened. A new country. A new language.

That may have been the hardest transition. You learn a new language, lose a little of your own every day, and eventually find yourself less at home in the language you were born into, while never quite at ease in the new one. I could no longer write in French at the level I once had, while my English remained below the standard I expected of myself. I had not exchanged one culture for another. I was learning to live in the space between them, carrying deep roots in one while forming another layer of life, thought, and voice in the other.

The precision of words has always mattered deeply to me. I could communicate in English long before I felt I could truly write in it. Writing has always come more naturally to me than speaking, though. It slows my thoughts to the pace of language. It gives me time to search for the exact word, to bring an idea into focus until it says precisely what I mean. But language is not only vocabulary or grammar. There is another difficulty: culture.

French is shaped by strict linguistic rules and social conventions. They are not the same, though they inform one another. Together, they shape how we construct thought, argument, intimacy, disagreement, and even politeness, in ways that differ from American cultural expectations.

Our differences do not lie merely in the words we use. We approach subjects and life itself in fundamentally different ways. We reveal ourselves differently. We behave differently in public and in conversation. The expectations surrounding what may be said, how directly, and with how much explanation are not the same.

These cultural and linguistic rules permeate writing. They are present in rhythm, tone, humor, logic, and what a reader recognizes as sincere, elegant, persuasive, or clear. They also inform judgments of what is appropriate, educated, or well expressed.

There is no direct translation between two languages because each opens onto a different way of inhabiting the world.

I also had to find my voice in English, in a life far from the one in which I had first begun to write. That took years. Decades, really, of tentative writing, searching for the right words, and trying on narratives that never quite felt like my own.

Yet those years of moving slowly through the world, observing, reflecting, and contemplating were leading me somewhere I could not yet see. Eventually, those elements converged. My mind, my spirit, and my voice found a continuous thread. This time, there was no choosing. Only finding my place in the life that had unfolded. Besides, I have things to say.

And here I am today.