The story is so improbable, it can only be true: A brilliant woman with a long history of mental illness-who once proclaimed herself to be "the center of the universe" - is miraculously cured by accidental carbon monoxide poisoning aboard the family boat. Nancy Bachrach warns readers, "Donrs"t try this at home" in her darkly humorous memoir about "the second coming" of her mother - the indomitable Lola, whose buried family secrets had been driving her crazy. Aching and tender, unflinching and wry,The Center of the Universeis a multigenerational mother-daughter story-a splendid, funny, lyrical memoir about family, truth, and the resilience of love.

Nancy Bachrach worked in advertising in New York and Paris, spinning hot air like cotton candy. Before that, she was a teaching assistant in the philosophy department at Brandeis University, where she was one chapter ahead of her class. She lives in New York City.

Author'sNote	p. xi
Things Fall Apart	p. 3
Slouching Towards Providence	p. 17
Intimations of Mortaiity	p. 36
Still Life	p. 65
Origin of the Species	p. 85
Mal de Mere	p. 103
The Undertow	p. 111
Play the Hand You're Dealt	p. 123
Lola Redux	p. 139
Curiosity	p. 150
The Thing with Feathers	p. 154
Unrequited Love	p. 161
The Second Coming	p. 176
Men Are Like Buses	p. 198
Candyland	p. 215
Afterword	p. 235
Acknowledgments	p. 240
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Bachrach: THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE

ONE

Things Fall Apart

MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND, 1983

In the ancient forest on the Right Bank of Paris lies a jewel-like island where Napoléon, just back from the Alps, built a Swiss chalet. Emerald lawns and ruby flowers shimmer beside a sapphire lake as peacocks stride by. On a sunny Sunday morning in May, I am ensconced on the chalet’s terrace, now a café, replenishing more energy than my leisurely jog has exhausted. Around me, lazy hands stir sugar cubes in slow circles and spread butter on crusty baguettes. These are the only signs of industry in a city where the principal exercises are digestion and strolling, laissez-faire is practiced and preached, and intermission is the pace of life.

I saunter through the woods toward my apartment as the ladies of the night flee daylight like vampires stumbling upon a cross. I know one of the Brazilians by name, since I pass her most mornings as she’s wrapping up her night’s work in tissues. Alexandro has just become Alexandra. Like her, I came to Paris to reinvent myself three years ago. Although I had no surgery, I did change my name, and while no one calls me a prostitute, sometimes I feel like one, admittedly, in another old and unlofty profession, advertising.

I’ve been relocated from headquarters in New York to tackle a marketing emergency for an important toiletries client— the launch of France’s first sorely needed antiperspirant. Our team on the Seine—ninety-nine people smoking and loitering above a gas station—won the coveted assignment (code-named Stink-o) even though they’ve failed for a decade to browbeat their countrymen into American bar soap. Which is why someone very high up at bar soap headquarters, someone with a good nose but a rarely used passport, smells an untapped market for deodorants over here, and although I can imagine the logic that led to this conclusion (and my relocation), the person who reached it hasn’t had to sit through forty focus groups in unventilated conference rooms in the provinces. Getting the natives to “adopt” a roll-on, stick, or spray will require “a paradigm shift,” I’m learning, a long and winding road that’s synonymous with a huge media budget and then, usually, failure. What would make the French—who relish the bleu on their cheese and their skin, who have a whole class of things they fondly call “stinky”—what would make them plug up their pores with wax to placate and enrich our big American client? This is the onerous marketing dilemma I face daily in my otherwise idyllic life in the City of Light.

To help me think through the Stink-o conundrum, I have the Semis—a squadron of French semiologists, not just translators but also linguists and cogitators, who are deconstructing the semantics of our antiperspirancy muddle. Not solving it exactly, just scrutinizing it in the Gallic way, ad nauseam. For my edification, the Semis are writing a treatise on perspiration, its cultural heritage, its evolutionary value, its distillation of primeval body essences. My task is to develop a successful campaign against sweat, when it rivals the madeleine in the collective olfactory unconscious.

Tucked behind a manicured garden in the Sixteenth Arrondissement is the elegant rue where I live—in a Beaux-Arts town house with a tiny filigreed elevator, where I would imagine Maurice Chevalier crooning to Leslie Caron even if “Gigi” weren’t playing on the concierge’s stereo. From my apartment on the top floor—four rooms with high ceilings and crown moldings, eight times the size of my New York studio, thanks to the value of the dollar under Reagan—there’s a postcard view of the tip of the Eiffel Tower, which I am admiring through open windows, when my phone rings.

The connection has

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