Memories

Vive L'Amour

Annamarie Holland Daniels ’83

I took French. I had Gisele Barrau-Freeman. And I had had so much French growing up that by the time I was a sophomore ... there were like five of us who were well beyond anything that was offered here. So Gisele got us all together. It was like, ‘All right, what do you guys want to do?’ And we said, ‘I don’t know. What can we do?’ ‘You can create the class that you guys want.’

So we did. We would go to the French bookstore at Rockefeller Center and buy trashy novels. We would all meet in my living room at cocktail hour and drink wine and discuss these trashy novels in French. It was hilarious. And it was great because they were written in slang French—there’s no way you’d ever find it in a textbook. And we really had to search to figure out what much of it meant. So it was a whole different take on French. That was a great class.

Send your memories of life at Sarah Lawrence, 200 words or less, to publications@sarahlawrence.edu.