Ransacking Paris: A Year with Montaigne and Friends

The seventh book by award-winning University of Queensland Press author Patti Miller, Ransacking Paris, will be launched in Sydney on Saturday 18 April at 4.30 pm at Gleebooks.

Ransacking Paris is an evocative story of Miller’s inner journey of her year living in Paris with her partner – fulfilling a life-long dream.

Miller grew up in the Wiradjuri country – central New South Wales – as a poor farm girl whose basic school French lessons introduced her to an imagined better life.

Years later, she moves to Paris, and with Montaigne, Rousseau and De Beauvoir as companions, has imaginary conversations with dead philosophers in Parisian cafes.

She joins a choir, studies the symbolism of bees, works on a book and examines a life in transition.

“In writing Ransacking Paris, I wanted to explore how the dream had taken root in my imagination and what happened when it became real,” said Miller.

“It was a turning point in my life; my youngest son had just graduated from high school and I wasn’t quite sure who I would be without the role of ‘mother’.

“I discovered that dreams can be fulfilled at any time of life, and some dreams inhabit us forever, even after they are fulfilled.”

Miller is the author of the award-winning memoir The Mind of a Thief (UQP, 2012), which won the 2013 NSW Premier’s History Award and has been set for the Victorian Certificate of Education English curriculum. She has also written writing texts Writing Your Life and The Memoir Book, a novel and four memoirs.

Media: UQP Marketing, 07 3365 2606, marketing.uqp@uq.edu.au