Bonjour, Au Revoir, (I Am Finally, Finally French)
A hilarious and heartfelt memoir
of embracing life in rural France.

At 47, Mark Greenside, a glass-is-half-empty native New Yorker living in California, unwillingly went to Brittany, and to his great amazement and surprise fell in love with the place and its people. Then, because love makes you crazy and do crazy things, he borrowed money from his mom and bought a 120‑year‑old farmhouse in Plobien, a village of 500 people. Thus began Mark’s bumbling, hilarious journey adapting to life in rural France. From navigating unwritten rules about touching tomatoes at the market to hosting dinners for discerning friends, every mishap and cultural and linguistic misunderstanding—of which there were many—became a lesson in resilience, perseverance, compliance, and humility.

Now, three decades later, Mark reflects on the unforeseen joys and challenges of growing older in the place he calls home every summer. With his trademark wit and self‑awareness, he reveals how his life in Plobien—and his friends’ and neighbors’ enduring patience and kindness—have shaped him into something he never thought he’d become: truly, deeply, finally French.
Both a love letter to Brittany and a meditation on life’s unpredictability, I Am Finally, Finally French is an invitation to laugh, learn, and savor the beauty of embracing change—no matter how daunting it seems… click to pre-order

In a world where more and more means less and less, in writing, it's still the meaning that counts. Good writing doesn't just appear, though it often appears that way. It's like sports, actually. The great players make everything look effortless, seamless, easy, as if the outcome was inevitable and never in doubt. Their greatness comes from natural ability, to be sure, but ability honed by hours and hours and years and years of practice, work, and discipline. Writing, like sports, is process, and if you're lucky, because luck is involved too, a product appears: a winning team, a great season, a beautiful poem, a story that grabs you. The "magic" of good writing is magic indeed, but also the result of many decisions, revisions, and clear intent.

And then there is publishing, the bane and prize of all writers. The finished work, chiseled from the heart, is the beginning of the publishing process, not the end. Writing a poem or a story without publishing is like composing a song and not singing it. It has nothing to do with the quality of the work or the talent of the author—there are a gazillion wonderful unpublished works in the world. It has to do with process.

Writing is communication, and unless a work is meant to be private, its intention is to be public. Publishing—making it public, sharing with the larger world, communicating, that's what writing is for. And here, with I'll Never Be French, we have both: product and process complete. I hope you enjoy your read.