Marriage With a French Accent

When Norma met Stéphane and they fell in love somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic, it was the coming together of more than just two nationalities. She was British and he was French which meant two distinctly separate cultures, two languages and two religions with two different attitudes to religion. She was a non-practising Jewish girl and he was very much a practising Catholic. When the news hit the family fan in Belfast and in Paris, whatever was said, fortunately couldn't be heard 3,000 miles away!

Just over a year later, defying statistics as well as Catholic and Jewish mixed-marriage prejudice, Norma and Stéphane's shipboard romance turned into a wedding in New York's St. Patrick's Cathedral. Another year down the road and with a baby on the way, they arrive at the Port of Le Havre to settle permanently in France.

In her delightful memoir, Marriage with a French Accent, (published by AuthorHouse), Norma Phillips takes a light-hearted look at the fun and frustration of adapting to life in France where her French mother-in-law, French father-in-law and five French brothers-in-law, were omnipresent.She finds herself caught up in the autocratic and gently possessive arms of a very original, whimsical and disconcerting French bourgeois family. There is Papa who, bless his innocence, thinks he runs the show, Maman who definitely knows better and even their grown-up sons incredibly and unquestionably accept the implacable rule of parental authority.

What happens when she not so- gently rebels against the system is what 'Marriage with a French Accent' is all about