Thirty writers and guests gathered in the Paris Writers Atelier, at 8 rue de la Bûcherie, greeting one another as we sipped wine, tasted fruit skewers and salmon hors d’oeuvres. Large portraits of Simone de Beauvoir, the French philosopher and author of The Second Sex (1949), along with Henry Miller, the American author of Tropic of Cancer (1934), peered down from the soft grey walls. 

       After a round of applause, Xiaolu Guo introduced her award winning documentary film, The Concrete Revolution. 

      In her film, Xiaolu follows the lives of the peasants, workers and families who are impacted by the construction of the massive facilities that are being built to accommodate the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Her film is our prelude to the 2024 Paris Olympics.

The evening was a perfect example of a literary atelier. Atelier is a French word, which often describes a space for working artists, fashion or jewelry designers. Paint, easels, sewing machines, fabrics, kilns and worktables fill the room for one or more artists where they create, display or sell their work.

The Paris Writers Atelier expands that definition. We are a meeting space for the Paris Writers Group and other writers. Our main tools are our computers, pens, tablets, cameras and phones. We meet to exchange ideas, discuss publishing issues, promote or sell our work, lead or participate in workshops and retreats, and learn from distinguished speakers. Some spend time writing in the Atelier or use our Henry Miller archives for research projects.

Valuable networking, enhanced by imbibing in French wine, champagne, food and desserts, begins and concludes most events. All provided by our talented members and guests. 

Janet Hulstrand, the author of Demystifying the French, who lives outside of Paris, said, “For me, the Paris Writers Atelier is an intellectual lifeline.” 

Follow our website and the Mary Duncan Youtube Channel for future Atelier events.

Mary Duncan Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMq-NiDA7w1QAJbxGHfBgrg

Katherine J. Chen received an award from the Paris Writers Atelier for a Work in Progress. Her new book Birthright (working title) which is under contract with Random House, explores through a revolutionary lens the brutal and strange world of Arthurian literature. Legendary characters are rendered startlingly human, as we follow the lives of Morgan le Fay and her half-brother, King Arthur. While set in a time and world extremely distant from our own, this work will engage timely themes, such as nation-building and genocide, the ties that bind us, and the limits—should they exist—of love. The novel’s writing derives inspiration from works, including Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and The Giant, O’Brien by Hilary Mantel.   

Katherine is the author of Joan: A Novel of Joan of Arc (Random House US / Hodder & Stoughton UK), which won the 2023 American Library in Paris Book Award and has been translated into nine languages, and Mary B (Random House US). 

She also received the Director’s Grant from the De Groot Foundation. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Electric Literature, Literary Hub, and other publications, with forthcoming work in the Times Literary Supplement and elsewhere. 

She is a graduate of Princeton University and Boston University’s MFA program and is pursuing her doctoral degree in English at Brown University.

 Mary Duncan, Director, The Paris Writers Group

“Rapturous and razor sharp all at once, The Age of Light fearlessly unzips anything we might know of Lee Miller as model and muse and recasts her as artist, free thinker and architect of a singular and unapologetic life. This novel sparks on every page.” –Paula McLain, New York Times bestselling author of The Paris Wife and Love and Ruin.

 “Sweeping from the glamour of 1930’s Paris through the battlefields of World War II and into the war’s long shadow, The Age of Light is a startlingly modern love story and a mesmerizing portrait of a woman’s self-transformation from muse into artist.”–Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere. 

Whitney Scharer, the author of Age of Light, spoke at the American Library in Paris on September 3, 2019 and the Petite Lumiere Librairie the following evening. Her historic novel focuses on the relationship between the Surrealist Man Ray and Lee Miller, a former Vogue model, who became a photographer and war correspondent during WWII.  We discussed the business aspects of her book, which received a million-dollar advance from Little Brown. This large advance was especially notable because Age of Light is her first book.

See: www.whitneyscharer.com

During our interview, it became clear that Whitney had broken some of the main rules of publishing. Our interview starts with those questions.

MD.  How did you find your agent?

WS.  “I didn’t have an agent until I finished my book. I met Julia Barer at Grub Street, www.grubstreet.org a creative writing center in Boston, where I had been their marketing and development director for ten years. I had written some short stories, have an M.F.A. degree and belong to a writing group called the Chunky Monkeys They are responsible for much of my success.” 

MD. How extensive was your digital platform which usually consists of email lists, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.?

WS. ” I didn’t have a platform. I’d rather write. My webpage was adequate, nothing more. Nor an email list consisting of thousands of potential buyers. I didn’t really have a blog, use Instagram, Twitter or have a professional Facebook page.  I’ve since learned that followers on Instagram.com and Bookstagram.com is one of the best ways to promote your book. A well-designed Facebook page is beneficial. I hired someone to design my new website. My publisher has also been helpful by providing publicists in the US and Paris.”

MD. You had fourteen publishers bidding for the rights to your book. How is this possible? I understood that five large conglomerates own the main publishing companies in the world. Many of their imprints cannot bid against one another thereby keeping advances lower than in previous years.

WS. “This is not always true.  Each imprint has a budget. Some larger than others. Of course, their budgets are determined by how successful their book sales have been. Most large publishers have some best-selling authors that support everyone else. My publisher, Little Brown, has James Patterson. The first run is 500,000 copies. Random House has Harlan Coben. He has sold over six million copies in France. Authors like Dan Brown keep the whole operation afloat.” 

MD How did you determine which offer to accept?

WS. “Julia Barer set up seven, one-hour phone conversations with the seven remaining publishers. Each one called me at home. I was really nervous and asked her what I should say. She told me to be myself, answer their questions and ask some of my own. The final decision was mine. She would provide input if I asked. It was craziest day in my life. Even crazier than giving birth.”

 “I thought I was going to have to sell myself. Instead, they were selling themselves by explaining to me their vision, marketing plan, size of their staff and my book tour.  Often, I was talking with one or two people but one publisher had twelve people on the line. They knew I could write. I think they just wanted to make sure I wasn’t insane.”

We narrowed it down to two publishers. At this point, the main criteria for me was the editor. I didn’t want my book to become an orphan, which can happen if an editor is dismissed, retires or joins another company. The editor I selected had been with Little Brown for over twenty years and had an excellent reputation. My agent was very pleased with my choice.”

MD How long was it from signing the contract to the  published book?

WS.  “We sold the book on September 20, 2017. Age of Light was released on February 5, 2019 – one year and four months. It also sold to fifteen foreign publishers. It took seven years to complete my book. The first two years were reading everything I could find about Man Ray, Lee Miller and that period in history. Lee is known for her quote, ‘I would rather take a photograph than be one.’ Also, her Holocaust photographs and self-photo taken in Hitler’s bathtub.” https://time.com › lee-miller-the-woman-in-hitlers-bathtub-munich-1945

MD. Were you consulted about the cover design?

WS. “Yes. They sent me three or four samples. I made the final selection. They kept my book title.”

MD.  You mentioned that you and another writer taught a workshop, “How to Write Sex Scenes.”  How was that organized? How many people attended?

WS. “Chip Cheek, the author of Cape May, and I started the workshop by reading some really bad sex scenes. There’s actually a “Bad Sex in Fiction Award.” We selected some of those. James Frey won it in 2018 for a scene that takes place in a Paris bathroom.”  https://literaryreview.co.uk › bad-sex-in-fiction-award

“Then we read what we considered to be good sex scenes from Broke back Mountain, Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney, Christopher Castellani’s Leading Men, which features Tennessee Williams.  Also, Castellani’s “All this Talk About Love.”

 “Sex scenes shouldn’t be gratuitous. They should make the plot move, improve understanding the character, be a moment of high drama, build sexual tension and have a reason to have to be in the story.”

“At the end, we had a Q and A session. About sixty writers attended.”

MD.  How has your life changed since publishing Age of Light?

WS. “I’m still building a platform and am writing a new book. It may be set in Palm Springs and Los Angeles in the 1920’s. I feel it’s important to give back to the literary community through mentoring and workshops. Even though I’ve written since I was a child, I now feel like a writer and we’re all on a pedestal. My husband, daughter and I also have a new home in Boston.

I also keep meeting fascinating people. Did you know that Penelope Fletcher’s mother was a codebreaker in WWII? (Penelope is the owner of the Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore). 

MD. If you could ask Lee Miller a question, what would it be?

WS. “Lee had a son after WWII. Anthony Penrose was raised mainly by a nanny. I’d like to know how Lee felt about being a mother.”

We finished our Grand Mariner Souffles and walked out into the cool Paris air. Whitney flew back to Boston the next day to embark on her US book tour.

_________________________________________________

Location of Interview: Josephine Chez Dumonet 117 rue du Cherche-Midi,  Paris, France 75006. September 5, 2019

 Whitney Scharer and numerous authors, who have spoken at the American Library in Paris and Shakespeare and Company, are also available on youtube.com. Perfect for viewing while on the treadmill or drinking a glass of wine.

Best regards,

Mary Duncan

www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-duncan

www.pariswritersgroup.net

www.pariswriterspress.com

Little Wonder Radio Plays, an independent production company, publishes full cast audio dramas from new and classic authors.  Each piece is around ten to twenty minutes in length, perfect for your morning commute or while youâ€re doing the dishes, and is recorded like a film:  full sound effects, professional actors, and plenty of action.

You can listen to the podcast through our host soundcloud:

Or as subtitled videos on Youtube:

Or via any number of social media and streaming outlets [click here]:

Or just pop the RSS code direct into your podcast app: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:435165690/sounds.rss

(If you’re reading this on your mobile phone and have a podcast app, clicking on that link should automatically subscribe you.  Otherwise, copy and paste it into the application section entitled “RSS Feeds.”)

To keep up with what weâ€re doing, check out www.littlewonder.website.  We release two plays a month, and have more than a dozen ready to publish.  What we really need now is to grow our audience.  Please take just a few seconds to listen, like, subscribe, comment and, most importantly, to share our work on social media.  Your support is our success.

We are also running a play-writing competition!  Send us radio shorts between 1600 and 2000 words long for no more than four actors.  Submissions are open from July 13^ – August 30, 2018.  Full details can be found here [click]. 

If you would like to write for us, please enter the competition.  All longlisted entries will receive feedback, all shortlisted will be performed, and the winner will be published as a full cast audio drama.  Every entry will be read by the company director and if your work shows promise we’ll be in touch.  In the future you know where to find us:  at the Paris Writers Group!

These women, who came from different parts of France and diverse backgrounds, would later cross the Atlantic to join their husbands, settle in various corners of America, suffer culture shock, and adapt to marriage in a foreign land of postwar plenty with varying degrees of success. Despite the difficulties, like many other immigrants, they got on with it and survived. Most of them did, in their own way, live the American dream.

The American Library in Paris will be hosting Hilary on Tuesday, November 7, 2017, at 7:30 pm. Books will be available.

See Hilary’s personal profile in the Who We Are section of this website. French War Brides: Mademoiselle and the American Soldier is available at Shakespeare and Company Bookstore Paris, D.G. Wills in La Jolla, and Albertine in NYC.
Also on Amazon.com.

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Mary Duncan

Last week PWG member Laurel Zuckerman, acting as Ancillary Administratrix of the estate of Alice Leffmann, filed suit against New Yorkâ€s Metropolitan Museum of Art to recover “The Actor”. The rare 1904-5 masterpiece by Pablo Picasso was owned by Paul Leffmann, a German Jew, for approximately 26 years until 1938.View “The Actor,” here.

For more information about the case, filed in NY see: Case 1:16-cv-07665

http://www.sdnyblog.com/files/2016/10/16-Civ.-7665-Complaint.pdf

NYT:  Met Picasso Belonged to Family That Fled Nazis, Suit Says  By GRAHAM BOWLEY

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/01/arts/design/metropolitan-museum-of-art-picasso-the-actor-lawsuit.html

Metropolitan Museum of Art Sued for $100 Million Picasso Sold by Collector Fleeing the Nazis

https://news.artnet.com/art-world/met-museum-picasso-nazi-restitution-lawsuit-680564

Suit Against Met Alleges that $100 Million Picasso Painting Was Sold Under Duress in Nazi Germany

http://www.sdnyblog.com/suit-against-met-alleges-that-100-million-picasso-painting-was-sold-under-duress-in-nazi-germany/

 

I am happy to have my friend and organizer of the Paris Writers Group, which I have belonged to since inception in 2008, Mary Duncan, as Parisian of the Month. Enjoy this eye opening interview.

Neham: Where were you born and where did you grow up?
Duncan: I was born and raised in San Diego, the land of sunshine, beaches, Margaritas and Dr. Seuss.

When and why did you move to Paris?
During the early 1980â€s, I decided to live in Paris. In 2000, after many years of planning, I embarked on an early retirement program at San Diego State University where I was a professor, bought an apartment and now live between Paris and La Jolla, California.  Paris nourishes and energizes me. Itâ€s intangible, but real.

When did you develop an interest in writing and literature?
Reading and writing have always been my favorite activities. I used to make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and smuggle them into the neighborhood library.

My Ph.D. dissertation, “The Effects of Social Conflict on Leisure Patterns in Belfast, N. Ireland,” paved the way for world travel and numerous research adventures to Nicaragua,  Tehran,  Berlin, Russia, Mexico and even Paris.  Curiosity drives me and it never seems to be satisfied.

How and why did you start the Paris Writers Group?
Since 1988, Iâ€ve been a member of the San Diego Writing Women. After I moved to Paris, I really missed our monthly meetings. In  2008, I created the Paris Writers Group.  We started in my living room with www.pariswritersgroup.net

Youâ€ve lived many lives in many places. You were once a Playboy bunny. What was that experience like?
I laughed out loud when I read this question.  I was never a Bunny. I had the boobs but not the legs. For over twelve years, I was a fairly regular guest at the Playboy Mansion.  Max Lerner, the late Los Angeles Times syndicated columnist and writer, was a good friend of Hugh Hefner. I was a friend of Max.

Staying at the Mansion was like living in a five-star hotel where you never received a bill.  Twenty-four hour room service, valets, maids, gym, grotto and pool, tennis, a game room with a billiard table, three private bedrooms for assignations, a vast film collection, a masseuse, all surrounded by a multi-million dollar art collection.  Dali, Pollack, Matisseand others adorned the walls.

In my book, Henry Miller is Under My Bed: People and Places on the way to Paris (2011), the chapter, “Breakfast at Hefâ€s”, has a colorful description of life at the Mansion. Actors James Caan and Tony Curtiswere regulars. My favorites were the writers and directors like Shel Silverstein and Richard Brooks. Some of the most stimulating intellectual conversations Iâ€ve ever had took place around Hefâ€s breakfast table.

In my first life, I was a ministerâ€s wife. I made up for those traditional years at the Playboy Mansion.

Please tell us about the time you spent in Moscow and the bookshop you owned.
In 1988, I met my husband, Yuri Loskutov, while participating in a Human Rights conference in Moscow.  After we were married in 1989, I began living there when I wasnâ€t teaching. Contemporary English language books were scarce. George Whitman, the late owner of Shakespeare and Company Paris, encouraged me to open a bookstore in Moscow.  I found a Russian partner who already had a small literary bookstore. We opened on April Foolâ€s Day in 1996 because everyone said we were fools to do it.

In those days, Delta let me bring three large seventy pound bags, filled with books and never charged me for excess luggage.  When Russian customs tried to charge me fees, I smiled and told them to keep the books and drink them with their tea.  They always waved me through.

From the first day, Shakespeare and Company Moscow became the literary center for Expats and English speaking Russians.  Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky and Masha Gessen, who now writes for the New York Times, were featured guests. We rapidly earned a reputation for our well-stocked lounge, which featured Starbucks Coffee, vodka and red wine.  Some readers would get tipsy while browsing for books. Yes, it helped improve the sales.

In the 90â€s, Moscow was like the Wild West and I thrive in these dynamic, fast-moving environments.  We closed in 2003 after Putinâ€s corrupt bureaucrats and mafia made life difficult for small businesses.

If you could invite one writer living or dead to dinner, whom  would you select and where would you take them.
There are two. Erica Jong and David McCullough.  Iâ€d take her to Jean-Georges in NYC. David McCulloughand I would go to the newly renovated Ritz. Itâ€s not too late. They are both still living. Iâ€m ever hopeful.

Who are some of your favorite French writers and books?
Colette and Simone de Beauvoir were fearless nontraditional role models. Simone chose her intellect over her heart and paid a heavy price in personal happiness.  Colette managed to have both.

After reading The Second Sex, I realized why I often felt out-of-step with societyâ€s expectations. Beauvoirâ€s concept of alterity, living your life through others, revolutionized my thinking. I decided to forge my own path and not worry about the consequences. Financial independence was an important key to that decision.  My first article in the Huffington Post was “How I Retired Early and Moved to Paris.”   huffingtonpost.com/mary-duncan

What is the book you are currently writing?
The rue de la Bucherie is the focus of my current book.  It has a rich literary legacy intertwined with the history of the street.

You have a fascination with Henry Miller; you wrote the book Henry Miller is Under my Bed and have a large archive of original Henry Miller materials. What attracted you to Henry Millerâ€s work and your fascination with him?
Bradley Smith, a Time/Life photographer and writer, wrote two books with Henry Miller. As a result, he had an archive of Henryâ€s taped interviews, photographs and letters. I used to sit on the floor of Bradleyâ€s home office in the hills of La Jolla, listening to Henryâ€s deep Brooklyn accent. Miller died in 1980, so I never met him. But I absolutely coveted those materials. After Bradley died in 1997, I purchased the archive from his estate as well as the rights to five of Bradleyâ€s books.

Two years ago, Dorothyâ€s Gallery hosted an exhibit of the photographs.

In his prize-winning memoir La Traversée du livre  (An Odyssey in Books), Jean-Jacques Pauvert recounts in vivid detail, his meteoric rise to the top of the French book world, which started 1942 in the mailroom of Gallimard publishers.  By the tender age of twenty, he openly published the banned works of the Marquis de Sade leading to a protracted legal struggle with the French authorities. A similar firestorm erupted when he published Histoire Dâ€O (The Story of O) in 1954, a daring work by Pauline Reage, a pseudonym used by Dominique Aury. His other authors included Gide, Sartre, Bataille, Genet, Beauvoir and Breton.

Pauvertâ€s memoir also describes his being arrested and jailed for three months by the Nazis for his role as a courier with the Resistance.

An Odyssey in Books is a captivating story of a young man figuring out how to be a publisher as he went along and an invaluable social history of art, literature, politics, and Parisian life from World War II to the May 1968 revolution.

The winner of the 2005 Elle Magazine Readerâ€s Grand Prize, the new English edition, An Odyssey in Books, was translated by Lynn Jeffress.

The National Book Center or Centre National du Livre (CNL) provides grants for translations of high quality French literature.  Since 2001, the National Book Center has supported more than 6,400 projects for translation from French into foreign languages.

In 2014, approximately 600,000 Euros were allocated for translations. The CNL funds from forty to sixty percent of translation costs. The Paris Writers Press will receive sixty percent, the maximum allocation.

The Paris Writers Press, founded by Mary Duncan in 2011, is a small independent press committed to publishing books, which focus on lingering social and political issues.  PWP publishes literary fiction, non-fiction, memoirs and French translations that relate to France.

For more information contact:  Mary Duncan   pariswriterspress@gmail.com   www.pariswriterspress.com

It was 2006 and playwright August Wilson needed a producer. The two-time Pulitzer Prize winner had died a year earlier, and it looked like the last installment in his ten-play Pittsburgh Cycle chronicling the black experience in America during the twentieth century might be buried with him – or certainly there was a good chance it wouldnâ€t reach a New York stage. Americans simply werenâ€t in a soul-searching mood. They didnâ€t want to be reminded of the two useless wars they were fighting, or the bogus Bush Presidency, or rising sea levels. They wanted to be entertained and Broadwayâ€s producers willingly abetted them. The Golden Age of musicals had arrived, with packed houses of theatregoers thumbing through Playbills for The Lion King, Hairspray, and Wicked, while dramas were few, frequently revivals, and always safe. Little challenged the publicâ€s complacency or provoked a contradictory thought, and certainly nothing asked us to confront the burning issues of the day.

To me, it was like Nero playing his violin while Rome burned.

By nature, I am a political animal. Sure I enjoy foot-tapping showstoppers, but I am equally entertained by books, movies and plays that make me think. And, itâ€s those thoughtful pieces that stay with me long after my foot has stopped tapping to the latest popular ditty. In 2006, there was hardly a play on or off Broadway that I wanted to see, let alone a play with serious political content. I decided to do something about that.

With the support of a handful of socially-conscious donors, I established the Smith Prize to encourage playwrights to write political theater. Arguably almost anything can be interpreted as ‘politicalâ€, so originally eligible plays had to, in some manner, address at least one of the questions: Who are we as Americans? What are we becoming? What are our global responsibilities? While those questions have been replaced by defining political theater as addressing concerns that effect the American body politic, the prize has always favored plays that tell intimate stories driven by bigger picture events.

Initially the Smith Prize was a $5,000 award evenly divided between the playwright and the first theater to mount a full production of the winning play. The intention has always been to get the plays on stage, not simply reward playwrights for well-written pieces that will never be seen by the public. From the outset, the prize struck a chord with playwrights, with close to three hundred submissions the first year. Though that number subsequently dropped as playwrights better understood the prizeâ€s objectives, the range of topics remains impressive; among them, stories of war, racism, corruption, and immigration told from the perspectives of simple people whose lives are profoundly changed by political events.

All of the Smith Prize plays have gone on to successful productions, but none has made it as far as the 2012 winner, Grounded, by George Brant, a one-woman show about a fighter pilot who is ‘grounded†after she becomes pregnant. Eventually she returns to the battlefield, but by then, her assignment is to fly sorties over Afghanistan by piloting drones from the safe distance of a trailer parked in Las Vegas. Grounded examines what is asked emotionally of todayâ€s soldiers, who fight wars and drop bombs from thousands of miles away, yet see their destruction with an acuity made possible by technology which no warriors have ever witnessed before. Brantâ€s play has racked up accolades across the U.S., including The New York Times, and was selected by Englandâ€s prestigious newspaper, The Guardian, as one of the top ten plays in London last year. All the praise has been justified. Hereâ€s only one passage from this tremendously powerful work:

Hard to go home tonight
The desert isn’t long enough
Still have bodies in my head
I circle the block a few times
Hope Eric isn’t looking out the window
Then I pull up and the door opens and the happy family greets their hero home from the war
Every day
Every day
Every day they greet me home from the war

It would be a different book
The Odyssey
If Odysseus came home every day
Every single day
A very different book

The Smith Prize has evolved since its inception, from an award for an existing play into a commission to write a new one. It has also doubled in value to $10,000, which provides a $5,000 grant to write a play based on the winning competitive proposal, $2,500 for the playâ€s further development through readings and workshops, and $2,500 to the first theater to produce it. Crucial to making the Smith Prize possible is raising $2,500 from private donors, meaning that every dollar donated is matched three-to-one by me and the National New Play Network, which administers the Smith Prize.

No doubt if Odysseus had come home every day, his story would have made a very different book. No doubt, too, if people thought about and acted on the critical issues of our time, the world would be very different. Ultimately that was my goal in creating the Smith Prize for Political Theater: to encourage people to act, individually and collectively, to make our world a better place for all of us.

For more information on the Smith Prize, or to make a donation to it, please visit: http://www.nnpn.org/about/programs/smith-prize. No gift is too small.

Timothy Jay Smith, a member of the Paris Writers Group, is also the author of Cooper’s Promise and A Vision of Angels.

By Mary Duncan

This article was updated on June 5, 2018 at the request of a reader who recently had problems with Crystalens. She said she wished she had found my article before her surgery and asked how my eyes are five years later. Frankly, I’m glad I had them removed by my French surgeon in Paris. He did not recommend laser treatments or anything else. Just get them out.

I use +300 reading glasses. My eyes are a little blurred when I’m tired. Sometimes I have floaters. So far, I have refused any other treatments. Thankfully my eye sight was restored  and I’m still writing.  For full details, please read my article.

“Double Z Syndrome” sounds like the title of a thriller. But it’s not. It’s what happened to my eyes after what was supposed to be routine cataract surgery.

My eye doctor at a prominent clinic in La Jolla, California, recommended Crystalens by Bausch & Lomb, as being the latest lens for replacing cataracts with an added bonus. I probably wouldn’t have to wear glasses. Vanity won out. I’d been wearing glasses for over thirty years and the thought of getting rid of them was worth the additional price of $3600.

Prior to surgery I did some research. Crystalens were designed by Bausch & Lomb in 2004. They are designed to move with your eye. In order to do so, they are shaped like a pair of glasses with only one lens. That single lens has two arms attached with small hinges, just like regular glasses. It looks like a “U”. This tiny Crystalens is inserted into your eye and only takes around twenty-five minutes. Local anesthesia is used. The surgery was fast and painless. A piece of cake as we say.

However, I made a mistake. I only read Bausch & Lomb’s information which my doctor gave me. I should have researched the internet for “Crystalens problems or complaints.” Dozens of negative reviews filled the page. If I had done this prior to my surgery, I would never have agreed to use Crystalens.

The first surgery was on March 19, 2013. The second was on April 2, 2013. Even after the first procedure, my improved eyesight was miraculous. I was thrilled. With my doctor’s permission, I flew to Paris on April 16 to continue research on a new book.

All was well until the morning of April 26. When I woke up, my eyes were very blurry. I could still read but was very far-sighted. In order to see the 40 inch television screen clearly, I had to sit two feet in front of it. Subway and street signs were difficult to read unless I was very close to them. Poor depth perception made me very unstable on stairs. I couldn’t differentiate between six inches and two feet. I was unsteady on my feet and couldn’t see red and green traffic lights. I absolutely could not drive a car.

I couldn’t go out at night alone. I hired a young woman to help with computer related work, shopping and accompanying me to evening events. All work on my book stopped. I started using taxis and then due to less exercise, gained weight. As a partial solution, I ordered temporary glasses, which cost $650 due to the severe astigmatism.

The depression caused by my eye problems increased as my dependence on other people became a daily necessity.

After I emailed my doctor, he increased the doses of Durezol, a cortisone eye drop. Of course, he would see me but I was in France. In desperation, I saw a French optometrist. He said drops would not help. I needed glasses but it was too soon to prescribe them. He said my vision was too impaired for me to fly to California alone. I might hurt myself by falling over luggage or stairs. I sent the results to my La Jolla doctor who also recommended corrective lenses.

Bausch & Lomb France was notified of my problems. They quickly referred me to an excellent French eye surgeon at Cochin Hospital in Paris. He diagnosed the “Z Syndrome” in both eyes. Basically, the Crystalens had buckled and were at an angle. One of the arms on each lens had flipped over backwards, forming a “Z.” No one would say what caused it, but apparently this was not a new problem with Crystalens.

My options were a laser treatment called a Y.A.G.; inserting a capsular ring, trying to correct the hinge and reposition the Crystalens; removing the Crystalens and inserting a monofocal lens. All had possible serious side affects.

I wanted them out. I felt like I had two time bombs in my eyes.

On July 18, my French surgeon removed 90 % of the Crystalens in my right eye. He left in the haptics or end legs of the lens because they had adhered to my eye and were outside the capsular bag. He inserted an Alcon monofocal lens. My vision improved immediately but my eyes were still very tired due to the left eye. I still could not fly.

Since my surgeon was going on vacation in August, we waited until September 10 to operate on the left eye. Everything went well. I now use +300 glasses for reading. My distance vision is normal.

Fortunately, I have excellent U.S. health insurance, which covered most of my medical expenses. The total cost for a tourist using the French eye clinic and surgeon was $4000 per eye. Viva la France. The cost in La Jolla for the original eye surgery was about $11,500 per eye.

When I included the cost of the Crystalens that were removed, my out-of-pocket expenses were about $6000 for the temporary glasses, assistant and taxis.

My La Jolla doctor said I was a good candidate. My French surgeon, who performs about 600 cataract operations each year, had a different opinion.

Last year, he only used Crystalens on forty patients who had very small eyes. He said this leaves very little room for the Crystalens to move or form the Z Syndrome. He now uses photos of my eyes at medical conferences to inform other doctors about these risks.

Before you agree to any major medical product or procedure, be sure to search the subject on the internet, such as, “Crystalens problems or complaints.”  Do this for DEVICES as well as procedures whether it be for your eyes, heart, knees, hips, etc.  Do not rely on the manufacturer or even your doctor to warn you about problems. One reviewer recommended a class action suit.

Double Z Syndrome is not a thriller. It is very serious and I’m fortunate to have a positive outcome, apart from the cost, pain and suffering and the delay in completing my book.

The end.