Here’s a funny thing. A woman walks into a room. She has no formal qualifications as either a nutritionist or a beautician. She has no professional experience in anything other than advertising and business development. And yet each woman in the room is hanging off her every pronouncement on weight-loss and cosmetic surgery as if she’s some kind of oracle. And for no other reason than the fact she is French.
Welcome to the trés bizarre world of Mireille Guiliano – author of the phenomenally successful, French Women Don’t Fat and its many follow-ups. A place where your nationality alone is enough to make you an instant expert on everything from cellulite to mental health. If it sounds strange to you, it’s borderline hilarious for the woman herself.
“It is quite odd when you think about it,” Mireille admits over a peppermint tea on a blustery Sydney afternoon as we wrap up The Weekly’s photo shoot and she bids farewell to the stylist, photographer and publicists who have been peppering her with questions about their dietary habits. “I was recently invited to speak at a conference about nutrition, and I had all these PhDs and doctors in the field looking to me as if I was an expert, when really I’m just a woman who happened to have grown up in France and got a book deal.”
And what a deal it has been. After penning the surprise 2004 New York Times best-seller, French Women Don’t Get Fat, Mireille and her publishers sensed they were onto something and quickly followed it up with French Women For All Seasons (a French style guide), then Women, Work and the Art of Savoir Faire (a French woman’s business manual) and the seemingly counter-intuitive French Women Don’t Get Fat Cookbook.
Mireille Guiliano is a French-American author with bestsellers French Women Don’t Get Fat and French Women Don’t Get Facelifts.
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French Women Don’t Get Facelifts – is Guiliano’s follow-up guide to how to stay younger-looking without recourse to cosmetic surgery. Because nothing succeeds, it seems, like a French woman franchise.
Of course, if you were a pedant you might be moved to point out that the titles of her books are just plain wrong. Afterall, French women do get fat. According to France’s Institut National de la
Statistique et des Etudes Economiques (INSEE) – the French version of the Australian Bureau of Statistics – the number of obese people in France has doubled in the past 15 years. Not least because a fast-food culture is increasingly taking hold of a nation that once jealously guarded its leisurely lunches.
As Michael Steinberger noted in his 2009 book, Au Revoir To All That, so popular had Le Big Mac become in the early years of the last decade that by 2007, France had become McDonald’s second biggest market in the world after the USA. A fact you won’t find appearing in any of the hundreds of books in print (Guiliano’s included) exalting the French as a nation of gourmands.
The same pedant might also point out that both the title and premise of Ms Guliano’s latest book are also incorrect. French women do get facelifts. Figures from the 2013 International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Global Survey reveal the French were the ninth largest consumers of cosmetic surgery in the world last year (admittedly far behind market leaders, the United States but significantly ahead of Australia in 21st position) – with breast augmentation, liposuction, eyelifts and nose-jobs the top four procedures sought out by the Gauls.
Certainly you don’t need to scratch too far beneath the glossy façade France presents to the world to see evidence of the French woman’s love affair with the surgeon’s knife.
Catherine Deneuve, one of the country’s most accomplished and feted movie stars looks deceptively fresh for her 70 years. Mission Impossible starlet Emmanuelle Béart, now 50, is regularly ridiculed in her homeland for a face that seems ever more stretched and a pair of lips that could give your average Tontine pillow a run for its money. And let’s not forget France’s former first lady, Carla Bruni, whose increasing resemblance to a cat have raised many an eyebrow (no pun intended).
When presented with the facelift figures over tea, Mireille, to her credit, demurs.
“Look, my book title is meant to be un clin d’oeil – tongue in cheek,” she says. “I used to see Catherine Deneuve all the time in my neighbourhood in Paris. And yes, she’s had a lot of work done.
But mostly, the French women I know rely on pots and pots of creams to look after their skin rather than resort to Botox.”
Which is apparently a noble distinction.
When shown graphs depicting the ever-expanding French waistline, Mireille concedes that yes, many French women are indeed getting fatter, but qualifies it with the observation that the influx of African migrants – with their imported dietary habits and relative poverty – has changed the shape of France – literally and metaphorically. (Does this mean her next book will be French Women Don’t Much Like Minorities?)
But perhaps all of this pedantry is to miss the point; to not get into the spirit of slavishly believing that everything the French do, everything they eat, every precaution they take to prevent crows’ feet and a chooky neck is inherently superior.
Certainly the robust sales here and in the US of Mireille’s books – and the copycats they have spawned including French Children Don’t Throw Food and French Parents Don’t Give In – would suggest we are all more than prepared to play our part in perpetuating the myth that the French are God’s gift to humanity.
And arguably it’s not Mireille’s fault that even in the face of empirical evidence to the contrary, the world is determined to put France on pedestal. She just happens to have struck a rich pop-culture seam and would be a fool not to mine it.
“But we are not perfect,” Mireille protests. “The French have many problems. And besides, we hate perfection.”
To meet Mireille in person is to come fact-to-face with the French woman stereotype. She is pleasant, stylish and well-groomed – a model of 67-year-old elegant poise. If she doesn’t get fat, it’s probably as much to do with her genes as any strict adherence to a diet of flaxseed-infused yogurt. She is a sparrow of a woman.
Born in Brittany, at the close of the Second World War, Mireille moved to New York in her twenties, married an Italian-American and forged her way through the ranks of corporate America, capping her career with a stint as the US CEO of the champagne house, Veuve Clicquot.
Her books, upon careful reading, are really just several hundred pages of cleverly-packaged common-sense. Eat non-processed foods, eat fresh produce, eat small portions, live a non-sedentary life, take the stairs not the lift, wash your face before going to bed. A fact she graciously acknowledges during our chat.
“This is not the work of a genius, it’s just common sense,” Mireille confides. “I am just writing about the things my mother taught me, the things I learned about food and grooming when I was growing up. Afterall, the French are very rational. We are very Cartesian in our thinking.
“The essence of everything I say in my books is to do things in moderation. It’s as simple as that. Fad diets only lead to yo-yo weight loss and gain and resorting to cosmetic surgery is a slippery slope.”
On paper, in black and white, The World According to Mireille may seem unremarkable. But when packaged up and delivered in a French accent, it makes us all sit up and listen.
Vive the great French deception.
Disclosure: The author lived in Paris for 10 years and – depending on his recent exam results – may soon acquire French citizenship. His 2007 travel memoir, A Town Like Paris, didn’t sell quite as many copies as Mireille’s books have sold. A fact about which he says he is not even slightly bitter.
A version of this story first appeared in the January 2014 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
