The author of Flâneuse: Women Walk the City joins the bus commuter crowds in this love letter to Paris, written in iPhone notes.

Commuting between English and French, Lauren Elkin chronicles a life in transit. From musings on Virginia Woolf and Georges Perec, to her first impressions in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, to the discovery of her ectopic pregnancy, her diary sketches a portrait of the author, not as an artist, but as a pregnant woman on a Parisian bus. In the troubling intimacy of public transport, Elkin queries the lines between togetherness and being apart, between the everyday and the eventful, registering the ordinary makings of a city and its people.

'I loved this book. I loved its honesty, its impatience, its tenderness, its testiness, its humour. I love all the different ways of noticing it lays bare. Indeed Elkin captures all the thoughts, impressions, digressions, and speculations that go on in our minds while we surrender to being just another inert body on a bus. Thrilling and absorbing, these are notes to treasure and return to… Throughout the journal there’s this subtle, tentative, age-sensitive thread that registers and reflects upon the presence and appearance of woman, young and old, with various attitudes of curiosity, mournfulness, criticism, pleasure.' — Claire-Louise Bennett

Les Fugitives, 2021, 140pages.