518: Moving Your Family to the “Des Moines of France” with Steve Hoffman

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0:32Creative people, I think, all think they need to go into creative fields. And if you watch what most of them end up doing, they're hustling more, in many cases, than if they had a regular job. And they're often not even doing the thing that they fell in love with when they thought they wanted to go into a creative career. It's very hard. And the reason is that everybody else wants to be a writer, too. This is Taste. I'm your host, Matt Rodbard. Steve Hoffman is a Minnesota tax preparer and food writer. Man, I love that so much. And according to Steve, when he dies, the tax preparer food writer industry will die with him.

1:12Steve is a French speaker and shameless Francophile, and his love of France shines through in his terrific memoir, A Season for That, Lost and Found in the Other Southern France. He writes with great detail and care about the story of uprooting his family to live in rural France and the many twists and turns and disappointments and revelations that come with this big life change. Now, if you've ever dreamed of moving to Europe to live a different life, this is the episode for you. A cautionary tale? Perhaps. But also, Steve is such a delight in telling his story, it may have you moving anyways.

1:49I hope you enjoy this conversation.

2:00Steve Hoffman, welcome to This is Taste. How are you, man? I'm good, a little bit afraid because you are one of the big ones. Oh, my gosh. Well, Steve, it's mutual. I really have enjoyed following your career and your writing. You haven't been writing your whole career. You have another job. You're a tax a real estate agent, seller. And I mean, I love the combination of skills. We were talking a little bit off mic about how it works with selling books. But tell us first, from the jump, a season for that, tell us about the journey that you embarked upon with your family that inspired this great memoir.

2:40Sure. So it set into 2012. It's based on a six-month stay, essentially an extended fall academic semester that we spent in the Languedoc region of southern France in a tiny 800-person winemaking village. That arose really its very earliest origins were my taking French and being fairly good at speaking French from an early age. And then going to Paris, I took my junior year off, lived in Paris, learned to speak French more or less fluently, but also learned that there was a side of me that I didn't know existed previously, that I, as this more or less uninteresting Midwestern kid, I could walk the streets of Paris, I could function in a world capital.

3:23And that gave me a kind of intoxicating view of who I might be. And I was enraptured with France for the rest of my adult life, in part because I kept trying to recapture that persona. um so the in 2012 we went there and that was really aimed at getting the kids in school they taken french in uh french immersion uh classes throughout their uh throughout their elementary school careers we wanted to cement that we wanted to justify a lot of commuting from suburban twin cities to the east side ofst paul and um we kind of thought we were on along for the ride to some extent. And when we got there, we realized, no, this is an interesting place.

4:06We realized that the way that we had traveled previously or the way I had traveled in France was not going to work this time. And we tried very hard to immerse ourselves in this village. And after lots and lots of failure, eventually did succeed. Yeah. No spoiler in the end, but it is a journey. It is definitely like a fish out of water tale. And while you tell the story of your family, there's a lot of zoom out moments because you're such a fantastic journalist. and you get into the details of Languedoc, what the culture is in small towns. And we'll talk about what Southern France is like compared with the rest of France and Paris.

4:40But let me ask you, when you move there with your family and it's like night one and you're sitting in that in your rental and you've got these kids, are you in a good mind space or what's going through your head? I would say we didn't have questions the moment we arrived or the first evening we arrived. we had questions about everything the morning after we arrived. And that was waking up to extraordinary heat, a dusty, unromantic, somewhat patched together looking village with streets that needed repair and cicadas singing. And I think we had arrived with a, we knew a little bit what we were getting into, but we didn't know everything we were getting into.

5:23And I think we had arrived a little bit with a romanticized Provençal idea of what we were going to be in countering and we were we were in des moines we were in a agricultural blue-collar working-class village in a way that we were not initially prepared for now let me ask you why there because it seems like you could have picked a different location but clearly you wanted maybe subconsciously to be out there in the boondocks a little bit i feel like this is what real like country life is like and many want that in some ways for their families. I think to some extent that we had the kind of experience that a lot of travelers imagine they're going to have when they go abroad but don't stay long enough to have or aren't willing to get off the beaten path enough to have.

6:12So Languedoc, let's talk about the actual region because you said Provencal but it's not quite in that region, right? You think of Provencal, like cities that are sun-kissed. You think of like Marseille, right? That's a Provence, right? Around there. But you're in a different region. Yeah, I would say I would equate Provence with a kind of rustic sophistication. Got it, yeah. A kind of elevated version of Mediterranean France. And the Languedoc is just poor, frankly. It wasn't overrun by Brits spending their money there for decades. And so I try to avoid the word authentic, but it is true to its roots in a way that Provence has in places lost because it has so thrown itself over to making sure that tourists are happy and making sure that it's pretty for tourists.

7:01And so when I say Languedoc, I do mean that it's a poor cousin to some extent. But what we were after was trying to become a part of a place. And that's very hard in place where there are a lot of tourists because the forces that push you in the direction of tourist experiences are so strong that they're very hard to overcome. And we had much less of that here. And so I think in some sense, the lack of romance was eventually what allowed us to have an almost sort of transcendently authentic experience, to use that word, where we would have struggled to have anything other than a maybe slightly deeper than average tourist experience in other parts of Southern France.

7:46So let's jump in and talk about the way food is presented in Languedoc. You know, it's Mediterranean more than anything. It's not the butter and baguette style that you might find in northern France and Paris, of course. So what are you cooking during your time there? I think it's interesting. I think we think of Mediterranean cuisine from this side of the Atlantic as the Mediterranean diet, which is, I think, altered in some sense to make it palatable to American palates, which are often exposed to limited spectrums of food, if that makes sense. We eat a lot of a limited number of things. And one thing that was surprising in the Mediterranean was how broad the palate is of those people there.

8:34But I also think that there is a kind of insistent rusticity about the true Mediterranean cuisine that is very much in contrast with what we think of as quote unquote French food. I think when we think of French food, we're thinking of refined technique. We're thinking of refined flavors. I think we're thinking of often of restaurant and hotel food. what we have encountered in those places. And there is almost a reveling in the smelliness and the strong flavors and the lack of refinement, the lack of sophistication of the food. It really is still a place that embraces food, very fresh food, cooked very simply.

9:13But it's also insistently smelly. It's anchovies. It's garlic. It's fennel. It's pastis. It's wild boar. it's lamb it's roquefort which you know we think of as a fairly approachable cheese but when you have real roquefort it will tear the roof of your mouth off right so that was one of the biggest areas we needed to sort of discover and come to terms with was just the insistent strength of the food and even the seafood that we were eating what are some of the struggles you mentioned you say you you had struggle after struggle to eventually having an epiphany And no spoilers, it's near the end of the book.

9:54So we got to let you read it. But let's talk about what it's like to actually be there with two children, right? Two small children. A nine-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter. Yeah. Okay. So you had a 14-year-old. So that's an interesting age for anywhere. But you're transplanting your family to Longaduck and you've got a nine-year-old who is probably out there playing with the cows, you know. So what's that like? I think both kids thought that this experience was being imposed on them to some extent. I think our nine-year-old son, who's kind of a gentle and open-hearted person, was more willing to just go along for the ride.

10:24But our 14-year-old daughter was very convinced that it was one of the tragedies of her life that she was not at the Shoreview, Minnesota lunch table talking with her teenage friends, but was in fact in southern France. So, yes, that was difficult. But I think the biggest failures that eventually led to our success were my own. and they arose out of my attitude upon arrival that this was going to be just another trip. This was going to be a light, pretty dip of our toe into a new part of France that we hadn't really experienced before. I was going to get to speak beautiful French with locals in cafes and shops and we would let it be what it is.

11:06We would let it go at that. And really my wife, Mary Jo, who's kind of the hero of the story and who is very much the truth teller of my life, insist at several points, at several turning points, that this is not possible, that we can't be here with them, with my family as extras in the Steve Hoffman show. I need to engage and immerse and lead if I really want France to be a part of my life, which I've wanted since I was 21 years old. And so the failures that we're talking about really were initially trying to cook my way into this place where my idea of French cooking was informed by what we just talked about, by French restaurant food, by refinement and technique and complicated recipes and long afternoons of making multiple dishes that create lots of dishwasher work.

11:53And I needed to, I was sort of at some, in some sense, beaten down by my own failure, reaching a point, one of those almost sort of 12-step rock bottom points where you have no choice but to change. And I had to change my attitude. Wow. So that's a lot to take in. As somebody who's a journalist and independent, you now need to look inward and have a real conversation with your family and make some adjustments. Clearly, there was some failure as you write in the beginning, but you start to slowly make adjustments. Talk about how that relates to the food, perhaps, if there's a way that the food and the agriculture around you and some of the interactions you have had with the farmers helped you look in a little more?

12:39I think there's, this book is a lot about acceptance. I think that's the, that's the key word that I use to guide my thoughts about the book as it evolved. It's two different levels of acceptance. There is the hard work to try to be accepted in this very insular village of 800 people in an external way, 800 people who are as much family as they are villagers, as they are fellow villagers. And that was very difficult. That a very difficult bubble to break. There is also a story about internal acceptance, about a 45-year-old guy who has never really felt that enamored with himself and who has fought self-acceptance over much of his childhood and adult life.

13:22And what I would say is the turning point of our external acceptance happens when, again, after failing to cook my way into this region, I find a way to get on a grape picking crew and understand that we're in a place that's surrounded by vines. We're about to enter the grape harvest season. And if I'm going to get to know this place, and if I'm going to become a part of it, I need to be out there where everybody else is. And over the course of the book, that really is the beginning of our being considered a part of this place, of our being considered peers and crew members rather than tourists and just parents of kids who happened to go to school there.

14:02And I think by the end there, we reach a point of actual friendship with some people, especially the winemakers in the village. I spent a lot of time, I almost have an apprenticeship, a winemaking apprenticeship over the course of this story. And I think there is an element of their considering me a friend by the end of the book that is so unexpected and so moving to me that it almost teaches me in some sense how to accept myself or that trying to accept myself is a worthy endeavor. Describe the wines of the region. I think Languedoc definitely comes to mind when we're thinking about the regions of France and wine profiles.

14:41Clearly, you were invested in the wine industry there. And what drew you, I guess, to Languedoc? Apparently, that's probably one of the main reasons why you went there. Surprisingly, no. We didn't really understand the extent to which it was a winemaking region. And I I was a wine lover in the sense that I liked wine's connection with France over the course of my adult life, but I was not a wine connoisseur. I was not a wine expert by any means. Languedoc wine has a reputation that was built over a lot of years where it was making, again, it's been a poor region for a very long time. It was making not particularly good wine for the army.

15:17And it is known sort of derogatorily as the lake of wine. It's the largest vineyard in the world. and during the early and mid 20th century farmers were rewarded for overproduction they were paid by the pound or the the the ton and so they would just simply push their vines as hard as possible to produce as many grapes as possible that has just begun to change and because it's an affordable region there are now young organic and biodynamic winemakers who are starting to move in because they can actually afford to buy a couple hectares of vines and start a business that has a certain amount of risk to it.

15:54But it still is, I would say, an undersung region. It's a region full of strong, powerful wines. The Reds are the best known. They are, in general, similar to Rhone wines with those GSM Grenache Syrah Mourvedre bases with Carignan and Saint-Saëns as the secondary grapes. The white wines are difficult because the Mediterranean sun tends to bake a lot of sugar into white wine and it loses acidity and it becomes kind of flat and viscous, a little bit flabby. But there are some really beautiful and fun local white wine grapes, particularly Grenache Gris, which we ended up working with a lot because one of the winemakers that we worked the closest with was making very ambitious wines.

16:40And his favorite grape, almost for the aesthetics of it, was Grenache Gris, which also is indigenous to the region and creates an acidic wine in the South, which is hard to do and it's hard to find. That's interesting. I think of the area, I think of like Lower Rhone, like Chateau Naf de Pau, and the big Grenaches, the big, bold, aged wines. And it's cool that here Langueduct has a style that is big, like the Rhone wines. I mean, it's the same climate, you know. It's they're all within a stone's throw of the Mediterranean. And what I really, one of my big discoveries that has informed my relationship with wine ever since we were there is that I now classify wine when I take a sip of it or when I think about it, not so much as from particular regions.

17:26I talk about this in the book as well, but not so much from particular regions or continents or old world versus new world, but latitude, distance from the equator. and the Mediterranean is where grapes are meant to grow. It's where they actually reach full maturity. And when you're there for long enough, yes, these are powerful wines. Yes, they're alcoholic. They're built on alcohol and tannin, not on acid, like more Northern wines. But you also start to think of them as like your home-based wine. And as you look at the rest of France and much Northern winemaking from that perspective, you start seeing that Bordeaux to some extent, certainly Burgundy, certainly Champagne, and certainly the Loire, are all actually dealing with the issue of under-ripe grapes.

18:08Let's talk a little bit about your writing, because I think that's an interesting topic, because you were known, at least to me, for your relative short-form writing, journalism, the reporting. And I think about this with my own work, about the transition from editorial journalism, you know, 2 ,000, 3 ,000 word at the most to like a full book. So how did you get into the mindset that this experience from 2012 would over a decade later become a book? I mean, you must've been thinking about it when you were there, but it took a little while. How did you make that transition from short form to long form?

18:51It started off as a journal. I journaled extensively while we were there. I think that helped teach me a couple of things. It required me to describe the same things over and over because I was describing many of the same and primarily food and wine. And so I developed some skills around describing things accurately and sensually and immersively because I had to describe things the first way I thought about them and then the next layer deeper and then yet a layer deeper. I think also writing almost daily about what our family was going through helped me to start understanding what a scene was, that it had a beginning, middle and end, and that, um, it needed to have some interest associated with it.

19:33It couldn't just simply be this happened and then that happened. But really there's the story of this book. I mean, it took me 10 years to write and I spent a lot of those years trying to just write better and better at the surface without really understanding what the storytelling techniques were that I needed to make it turn into something where people want to turn the page. and I encountered in some sense, there's a, there's a failure story, uh, of my actually writing the book that parallels the failure stories that led eventually to success inside the story itself. And that is that I was had a little bit of an ego.

20:07I was in love with what I could do with words on the surface of my writing. And I was refusing to admit what I was not good at. And at some point, again, I had a sort of bottoming out turning point moment where writing coach said after I'd been working on the book for 10 years, she said, Steve, you're a beautiful writer, but nobody cares. Wow. I mean, was she right? She was absolutely right. And she was right because what I was doing was creating distance with my words. I was creating, I was putting on a performance. I was putting on a persona. There was a kind of shield effect to my using beautiful words to describe things.

20:44What I was not doing is inviting people to get to know me. I mean, I totally recognize the food writerly trap when you think you are writing something so great and you have a skill, but essentially you're, you're writing in a style that, you know, is maybe MFK Fisher, maybe Ruth Reichel, maybe Jonathan Gold, maybe someone else, but doesn't truly land, um, you. And in a memoir, um, it needs to be both, um, it needs, it needs to be a mirror, right, of some sort, a mirror into your own existence for memoir to hit. You need to put your messiness out there. Yeah. You need to accept that what you don't know and what you're not good at and what you're afraid of are things that people want to hear about and want to watch you actively try to work through.

21:39I feel as if telling the truth was something I had to learn to do. I was being accurate. I was being factually accurate. I was, and I was, I was, I could be fact checked and I could put somebody in a scene well and accurately and describe things in such a way that what I was describing would arrive in the reader's head in an effective way. But I wasn't telling the truth, which I came to understand as my reaction to these moments with food or with travel that are based on the extreme weirdness and specificity of who I am based on all of the experiences I've had over the course of my life. And what that coach was really telling me was, you're not letting people get to know you and people want to get to know you.

22:27And until you're willing to let them get to know you, you're not going to be the writer that you want to be. So what happens then after she tells you this advice, something turns around? I mean, your work that she is making the claim that is no one cares. I mean, it becomes a book. We're here in the office of your publisher and we published your book. It's a wonderful book. I was out in July. And there must have been something that changed. Two things, I think. First of all, she helped me understand what that meant. We went through some scene writing together that are now in the book that I'm sure you can probably recognize if you haven't read the book, where I aim for what was the most uncomfortable previously.

23:10I aim at experiences that I would have preferred not to talk about previously. So there was some training in just simply accepting that moving toward what is uncomfortable is actually a productive direction to go in rather than trying to avoid what's uncomfortable. The second thing that happened is that, again, I had one of those, as we talked about, I had a couple of these rock bottom moments. And the other was after she told me that, after seven years of this fricking book, that nobody cares. I had to accept that there were things that I was not good at as a writer, and I needed to work relentlessly on those to get better at them.

23:47And one of them was story and structure. And so what I did was actually take a screenwriting class. And what that did is kind of wipe the table clean of my ability. It didn't matter that I could describe an apricot beautifully in the orchard of my next door neighbor in Southern France. That's not what a screenplay is about. A screenplay is about narrative momentum. It's about characters that we care about. It's about conflict. And it's about ultimately getting a reader or a viewer to want to know what's going to happen next and in a book to turn the page. And that was probably the biggest turning point of the late second half of my journey to try to get this to an impublishable condition.

24:24Did you ever think about flipping it to fiction? Absolutely. That must have been an interesting internal debate. It was. But I don't think, I think I really only got to the point where I could have even written it as fiction so late in the process that it wouldn't have made sense. It wouldn't have made sense. Well, Steve, I mean, this is great to talk about craft. We don't really get to do that too often. I'm glad we could get there. I mean, do you have any regrets from this book? My only regrets, I would say, are that I took so long. I fought so long. I was stuck in my own. I couldn't get over myself fast enough.

24:59I spent too many years believing that I was pretty great and gathering that opinion of myself based on all the things that I did well and not peering under the rug at what I was not doing well. But that's how I was wired. That's how I was brought up. Those are my defense mechanisms to get through life. And to some extent, it could only have happened this way. I'm good at what I have always been good at, in part because I'm a perfectionist. And part of what I had to get over was my perfectionism. You can't have one without the other. So I do feel as if it's both two sides of the same coin to some extent.

25:35We're all the more lucky, you know, to have this book. I feel it's definitely feels like it took a lot out of your own personal life. And it seems like you sacrificed to make this book happen. It started really as a travelogue, as a charming, witty travelogue. and it turned into something that is a lot more about life and family and being full of self-doubt and being agonized as a parent and things that people really care about. Not everybody cares about the Languedoc region of southern France. I mean, you haven't given it the most marketing and PR. And clearly there's a reason it works so well, because you're not writing about Nice or even Alsace-Laurent.

26:16You're not up in these mountains. You're in the cow piles. Right, right. did you ever get into the Tour de France when you were there? we did we spent a summer in Brittany we spent two months in Brittany when the kids were even younger and it there's a huge biking community in Brittany we watched it come through there but no I was out in the fields you were working have you been back to France for any extended period of time since this 2012 scene? yes we actually went back four more times so we went back to the same village, back to the same house. Kids went to the same schools four additional times because we had made friends.