Paris Blue

From acclaimed concert flutist and the artistic director of Mistral Music comes a passionate memoir about young love, heartache, and the role of memory in our lives. Inspirational and heartfelt, Paris Blue: A Memoir of First Love is a true fairy-tale memoir with a dark underbelly about the tenacious grip of first love.

PARIS, 1976: Twenty-year-old American student Julie Scolnik arrives in the City of Light to study the flute when, from across a sea of faces in the chorus of the Orchestre de Paris, she is drawn to Luc, a striking (married) French lawyer in the bass section. This deeply moving tale of an ebullient young American and a reserved Frenchman will transport readers to the cafés, streets, and concert halls of Paris in the late seventies, and, spanning three decades, evolves from deep romance to sudden heartbreak, and finally to a lifelong quest for answers to release hidden immutable grief. A deeply felt, bittersweet reflection on how youthful passion changes you and clings to you forever, this is a story that has embedded itself in Julie’s heart and mind for forty years. It is time to share it.

Letters play a fundamental role in the memoir, each chapter beginning with a letter that Luc has sent during their separation, and each letter foreshadowing what is to follow. Time moves quickly in the final chapters, and Scolnik’s self-discovery about the role of memory in our lives brings satisfying closure to the story. John Irving wrote of the ending: “It’s a good story, but what sets it apart is the resolution at the end.”

Julie Scolnik is a concert flutist and artistic director of Mistral Music, a chamber music series she founded in 1997 that has brought her accolades for the high caliber of her artists, her imaginative programming, and the personal rapport she establishes with her audiences. She lives in Boston with her husband, physicist Michael Brower, and their two cats, Daphne and Chloë. They have two adult children, Sophie and Sasha Scolnik-Brower, also musicians.