Toujours Provence is the sequel to Mayle’s wildly popular 1989 A Year in Provence, which I haven’t read yet. This is a memoir of living abroad, which is different from a travel memoir in important ways. Rather than being temporary guests in France, Mayle and his wife, who are British, live in Provence year-round and strive to live as the locals do. While they make many friends and take in every aspect of the culture, there is a sort of shrugging acknowledgement that they could never actually be locals, never truly Provençal. I think that is perhaps unfair, especially knowing that they ended up living there for 25 years before Mayle’s death in 2018.
The book is a series of lighthearted vignettes about life in Provence, the characters Mayle meets and the adventures they go on. There’s much talk of food and wine, plus truffle hunting, buried Napoleon coins, a Pavarotti concert, a dog show, and a bit of history. There’s very little in the way of poetic descriptions of the landscape — a good thing, I’d say, as Mayle is at his best when relaying interesting conversations with people he meets.
It’s that sense of social connection that makes this book feel like it was written by a local, even if Mayle never considered himself one. I can’t help but contrast this method of place-based writing with another mega-popular memoir of living abroad (title withheld since I haven’t finished it yet) where the author seems less connected with the local culture and people, and consequently spends many pages romanticizing the landscape and the feeling of living somewhere unfamiliar. That feeling is undeniably powerful, and when you are new somewhere it can help push you out of your comfort zone and give you permission to live a new life to match your new environs. But it is also a sort of psychological mirage: the place filtered through your psyche to suit your needs. Once it has served its purpose, the feeling dissipates and you can start to see the place clearly.
What does it mean to be a local? I think it has a lot to do with social connections. If you’ve lived somewhere long enough to be friends with the locals, I’d say you’re a local too. For Peter Mayle, that didn’t take long at all, and it’s the characters and conversations in Toujours Provence that make it feel like you’ve got a seat at the table with the author and his friends.