Courtney Maum

Courtney Maum is the author of the novel, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, out now from Touchstone Books. The humor columnist behind the “Celebrity Book Review” on Electric Literature and an advice columnist for Tin House, she splits her time between the Massachusetts Berkshires and New York City.

From Maum's Q & A with Ana Homayoun:

Q. Your debut novel, I AM HAVING SO MUCH FUN WITHOUT YOU, is mainly set in Paris, where you moved after graduating from Brown University. Who or what encouraged the move? What did you do while you were there? What made you come back to the States?

I studied abroad in Paris and I just had that “this is it” feeling that you get when you know a match is right. It can happen with romantic partners, as it can with cities. I just felt like Paris was a place that I could thrive in: the way that I think and act and am inspired simply makes sense there. My senior year of college, I had a French boyfriend which made the move easier in terms of logistics, but we ended up breaking up three months after I arrived. He said he’d drive me back to the airport and I was like, “Are you kidding? I’m staying!” Rather naively, I went to Paris without a working visa so I had to take a lot of sketchy jobs—one was working for an online psychologist, another was consulting as a trend forecaster for a French woman who threw chairs around the office when she wasn’t happy about something. I finally ended up getting a visa to work as a party promoter for Corona Extra where I worked for three years. I ended up moving back after five years in France because my family and friends were beginning to forget that I existed—I have a younger half-brother who wrote an essay saying that he had a sister who was French. Plus, my husband (who I met three years into my Paris sojourn) is a French filmmaker who had never lived anywhere but Paris, and...[read on]

Visit Courtney Maum's website.

The Page 69 Test: I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You.

--Marshal Zeringue