Kiss Me Again, Paris: A Memoir

Recently escaped from her German family and student husband, Stendhal ekes out a living as a cultural journalist in Europe’s most cultured city. She walks Paris at night dressed as a boy, has friends and lovers among artists (Meret Oppenheim) and writers (Christiane Rochefort, Monique Wittig), and falls under the spell of the mercurial actress Claude, who has all of Paris talking. At the same time, she finds herself in the crosshairs of an alluring stranger who seems to appear everywhere and nowhere at once. There are mysteries with and without clues: Is sexual obsession a way to avoid the risk of love?

Kiss Me Again, Paris won several awards and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award

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Praise for Kiss Me Again, Paris

"[Stendhal's] memoir is notable for a variety of reasons: it's a window into the gay female melee of the moment, and she has a particular way of recalling her encounters with luminaries. Some she names outright, like Meret Oppenheim and Pina Bausch; others' identities she keeps under wraps. It's a tactic that places the book in a category Stendhal playfully refers to as memoir à clef, a twist on the roman à clef: a novel with 'keys' to uncovering the real in the fictional." —Autostraddle

”Never has a memoir enraptured me as completely as Kiss Me Again, Paris. Renate Stendhal reached through the pages and took me by the hand, pulling me back into Paris in the 1970’s and into her skin.” —Lesbrary

“Renate Stendhal’s daring new book throbs with the pulse of Paris in the 1970s. Written with verve, this book captures the sense of erotic excitement that Paris continues to inspire.” —Marilyn Yalom, author of How the French Invented Love and The Social Sex

“Meret Oppenheim, friend and mentor to Ms. Stendhal, would certainly admire this book, and pass it on to others so others could make their own art from it. It’s the ‘Fur Teacup’ of memoir.” —Thomas Fuller, author of Monsieur Ambivalence: A Post-Literate Fable

“Renate Stendhal feels Paris in every fiber of her being. She is able to carry the reader with her into all these delicious places, some well known and some known to few. Relax and let her take you. It is a memorable journey.” —Hugh van Dusen, HarperCollins executive editor (for 60 years)

“Most memories fade to smoldering embers. Renate Stendhal’s recollections have remained a bonfire. The tapestry of her remembrances had their genesis in her rejection of a former life and the embrace of a new authentic one. Details of her years living in Paris during the ’70s are carved into her psyche. She takes us with her to the cafes where the fragrance of a passing woman would turn heads. We hear the murmur of the Seine. We see the dark shadows under a bridge and the glow of a cigarette as a rouged mouth draws on it. There’s an old adage that says memories worth remembering are remembered. Whoever coined this must have had Renate Stendhal in mind.” —Anna Hamilton Phelan, screenwriter of Mask, Gorillas in the Mist, and Girl, Interrupted

"Though it is written in the European milieu by one steeped in both classical and avant garde art with frequent cultural references, its basic sense of yearning for love lost and found is universal and provocative. The city of Paris seems to be a true character in the drama; her byways and boulevards, buildings and surfaces are organic, open to experience. To me, the metaphor that pulls the entire work together is the film, "Last Year in Marienbad." The film reflects how your memoir shifts from present to past to tempting future, to forgotten past to remembered past: That is the central movement in its perception of time and illusion. Surreal and real. It should be an art film!” —Kate Farrell, author of Story Power

I had the chance of a lifetime to spend ten days in Hawaii at a friend's house in Kauai this past summer, and my prime, choice for literary companionship was Renate Stendhal Kiss Me Again, Paris.  In escaping to an idyllic setting, I wanted a book that was nothing less than an equivalent paradise of gorgeous sentences perfectly timed to the entrances and exits of a story's characters. As a bildungsroman of an outsider who secures her place in a youthful microcosm of perspicacious romantic attraction, Stendhal's memoir manages to exceed the glow of its backdrop by reviving each instance of  the author's recollections as if they breathed again in an ineluctable encounter with palpable imagination. --Bill Mohr, author of Poetry Loves Poetry: An Anthology of Los Angeles Poets

“Paris has been many things for lesbians: an escape, an entryway, a refuge for artists and expatriates, a realization of lives lived more openly and freely. This is what Renate Stendhal vividly brings to the fore with her memoir, Kiss Me Again, Paris which follows her lesbian life and desires in Paris in the 1970s. 

     Having escaped her confining life in Germany where she was raised, Stendhal comes to Paris where she works as a cultural journalist and immerses herself in the art scene there. This move is an endeavor in self-preservation and self-sovereignty: a freeing of her self from the suffocating grasp of German rules and social mores, of attempts to force her into the patriarchal coffin of domesticity by being defined by the roles of wife and mother. Stendhal flees this dead life paraded to her as her future and instead seizes Paris with its freedom, dynamism, eroticism, and the chance it gives outsiders to reinvent themselves. 

     With a personal and absorbing writing style, Stendhal immerses us in the heady days of Parisian dyke life and culture in the 1970s. She makes one feel the chemistry and energy of this time, the erotic excitement of lesbians finding and relating to one another – in cafes and clubs, at parties, and in lecture halls. We are drawn into the colorful stories of women from her past like artist Meret Oppenheim and writer Monique Wittig. These retellings are personal, notable, and intriguing.  

     At the center of Stendhal’s story is a love triangle of sorts – including an obsession with a lover who plays hot/cold and a mysterious stranger who captivates her and brings the past and present together in unanticipated ways. In addition to passion and desire, one also sees the dysfunctional dynamics in these relationships -- the obsessive/compulsive tendencies that lesbians sometimes play out and the ways in which such sexual relating can be a way to avoid the risk of love, especially its vulnerability and exposure. Through Stendhal’s telling, one sees the stage of lesbian desire, but in the end it’s about working to remove the masks we often wear, seeing the vulnerabilities of who we are and how the past follows us even when we feel we have left it behind. 

     Illustrated with Stendhal’s own vintage photographs, Kiss Me Again, Paris is an engrossing memoir that shares the contours of a lesbian’s life and shows how a place like Paris can shape and permeate that life in profound ways. —Reviewed by Gariné Roubinian, Published in Rain and Thunder Issue 75: Summer 2020.