SHOREVIEW — Sometimes people find a moment in life where there’s a need for a big change. Maybe not a permanent change but a big shakeup.
That happened with Minnesota author Steve Hoffman and his family. They decided to move to a tiny wine village in Southern France.
The move is the focus of his memoir A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France. The family made the decision to move to France because Hoffman had been a Francophile his whole life and his two kids had been going to a French immersion school in the Twin Cities. The hope was they would attend an actual French school to cement their language skills.
“We wanted to get our money's worth by having our kids actually speak French when it was all said and done,” Hoffman said.
They ended up in a small village in rural Languedoc. It checked all the boxes of what they were looking for: warm, affordable and a landlord willing to rent to them for six months. However, they didn’t really know a lot about the town before their arrival. The memoir is a lot about the discoveries they made during their stay.

This wasn’t the first time Hoffman lived in France. He took off his junior year of college, and he lived in Paris for nine months.
“That’s where I switched from being a semi-reluctant but fairly good French student to being an enthusiastic lover of France and the French language,” he said.
It was a big jump for a kid that grew up in the suburbs in the Twin Cities.
“Suddenly, I had this vision of myself as a world citizen," he said.
"As a sophisticated person striding the streets of Paris and feeling as if this is a version of myself that I really liked a lot and actually preferred to the version that I've been stuck with for 21 years, so a lot of my then adult relationship with France was an effort to kind of recreate that feeling.”
Life lessons
The stay with his family gave him an entirely different experience with France. A lesson he learned is that you’re stuck with who you are, no matter how much you try to escape it.
“I kind of rediscovered my own family by going abroad,” Hoffman said.
There are some very personal moments in this book that Hoffman doesn’t shy away from. One of those moments is a phone call with his parents where he admits to them he was disappointed with his father. Hoffman said keeping events like that in the book were some of the toughest decisions he made while writing.
He felt the book needed scenes like that because without them, it would be just a sweet little travelogue, which isn’t the kind of book he wanted to make.
“Having those bad times inform the later good times in the book makes the good times much richer emotionally,” he said.
Hoffman's second time living in France not only gave him a food writing career but also a seismic shift in his relationship with France. He feels he’s become a more admirable person.
He also learned lessons about the importance of sharing things like food and wine in your daily life with people you love instead of using food and wine as a way of showing off.
"This trip taught me that food, wine and cooking are ultimately about people you're making happy rather than a performance," Hoffman said. "... I'd spent a lot of my life cooking at people satisfying my own ego, trying to show off a little bit, and this taught me about cooking for people."
Hoffman thought the "big moment" in the process of writing this book was when he was finally going to be able to hold the book physically in his hands. It was a nice moment, but he said by far the greatest moments in this process were the feedback he would get from people reading the book. People have told them the book helped them get through a terrible time of grief, laugh out loud or connect to their spouse.
“That I can put words down and that those words are going to connect me with someone I will never meet in my entire life. And yet there will be this emotional moment between the two of us, remotely. That kind of connection is just magical to me,” Hoffman said.
People can find more about Hoffman on his website and his Instagram. His book is available on Amazon and at other independent bookstores.
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