A Season for That

Lost and Found in the Other Southern France

De: Steve Hoffman

Narrado por: Steve Hoffman

In this poignant, delicious memoir, American tax preparer and food writer Steve Hoffman tells the story of how he and his family move to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about food, wine, and learning how to belong.

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the café and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, it’s getting into fights with your wife because you won’t break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away.

But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker’s apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he’d held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.

©2024 Steve Hoffman (P)2024 Random House Audio

Genuine

This book was an absolute delight to read. It felt as though Steve had returned from his time abroad and was bursting with excitement to share all his experiences with me. I was completely engrossed in the story. While my love for France, passion for wine, and my time living there undoubtedly influenced my emotional response to the book, it was solely because the author has a deep understanding of the country, beauty of winemaking, and a remarkable talent for capturing its essence in writing. Well done!

Took me to France for a few hours

This memoir let me escape to France for a few wonderful hours, laughing at Steve’s winemaking endeavors & enjoying his cooking!

a Nouiahing Feast

Sometimes you cook trying to provide a balance of nourishment for those in your care and sometimes as love.
This work is to taste, to experience, to see, touch, know and be known.

Good Story

if you are a wine person, like to see people better themselves, and are a bit of a dreamer. This will be a good book for you. First half of the book starts off a little slow and it makes sense towards the end. Why all the detail. I was really into the book at the 60% mark and couldn’t put it down. Was sad that it ended, but it ended in a way that allows someone to think.

Beautifully detailed memoir

5 stars for his writing and books read by the author are my favorite. This is a vulnerable exposé of what he went through to assimilate into his favorite country. His wife though! He does not judge her, just relates facts but she seems a dehumanizing harpy! She bullies the author so badly it's cringey. That said, his descriptors of the food, environment and characters immerse you in his experience.

Wonderful memoir, wonderfully read!

Starts off seeming a bit too earnest, until you realize that’s just the nature of the narrator, soon enough the listener gets pulled into his world. He writes beautifully and engagingly and at the end of each chapter you find yourself wanting to keep listening to just tone more. I wound listening to the entire book over the course of one day. He reads it beautifully as well. Wonderful memoir!

So relatable

Fabulous book and fabulous reading by the author. Whether you approach it as a lover of food, wine, France, or simply as a parent, I expect you will find pieces of yourself here. I know I did.

Honest and Relatable!

I wasn’t sure when I first started listening if this was going to be a bragging account of how well the author spoke French! As a life-long Francophile myself, that breed of snobby French-speaking American who wants to situate himself a rung or two above another American Francophile is all-too familiar a character. But there was something so honest and relatable about his experience, of needing to fit in and be accepted to the point of sacrificing his family and then overcoming that need with the help of his wife. His descriptions of trying to recapture a mythological best ”French self” that he had been in his youth rang true with me who had a similar adjustment returning to Paris as a mother and feeling a little broken-hearted. I loved the evolution of the family and their friendships over the course of their stay.

The writing is so engaging on so many levels n connection he’d work

This is not a good book it is a great book my consciousness was elevated finding the beautiful experience that comes form hard work exe executed with taste and tenderness and gusto and respect for what is possible

Felt I was there

Hoffman's travel memoir belongs in the league of Frances Mayes and Peter Mayle. I will be relisteneing to this one. He was the perfect narrator.