--- --- # Bons Mots In a New Language by [Sarah Begley](https://time.com/author/sarah-begley/) ## Sarah Begley Sep 15, 2016 9:56 AM UTC by [Sarah Begley](https://time.com/author/sarah-begley/) ## Sarah Begley Sep 15, 2016 9:56 AM UTC When Lauren Collins left her provincial North Carolina hometown, she writes, “no one would have guessed that I would become an American living in Switzerland with a Frenchman I’d met in England.” But that’s exactly what happened. And when one falls for a Frenchman, one must learn French. In her emotional, erudite memoir When in French, the New Yorker writer documents her linguistic labors, including the missteps–she accidentally tells her mother-in-law she gave birth to a coffeemaker–on the road to mastery. At times she expounds on the history and philosophy of language; at others, it feels like catching up with a clever friend you haven’t seen since college. But the most intriguing question posed is as much about identity as language: Are you someone else when you speak and live in a non-native tongue? “I wanted to speak French and to sound like North Carolina,” Collins writes. “I was hoping, though I didn’t know whether it was possible, to have become a different person without having changed.” –SARAH BEGLEY Bons Mots In a New Language ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4494752/bons-mots-in-a-new-language/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4494752/bons-mots-in-a-new-language/"},"headline":"Bons Mots In a New Language","datePublished":"2016-09-15T09:56:39.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-23T00:36:33.528Z","description":"When Lauren Collins left her provincial North Carolina hometown, she writes, \"no one would have guessed that I would become an American living in Switzerland...","url":"https://time.com/4494752/bons-mots-in-a-new-language/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Sarah Begley","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/sarah-begley/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/ideas/","name":"Ideas"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4494752/bons-mots-in-a-new-language/","name":"Bons Mots In a New Language"}}]}] ```