Park City author Marianne C. Bohr turns to fiction with ‘When Paris Whispers’

Park City author Marianne C. Bohr’s new literary novel, When Paris Whispers, follows a young woman’s journey through 1981 Paris as she confronts questions of identity, independence and belonging. The book will be released Sept. 1. Photo: Marianne C. Bohr

PARK CITY, Utah — For Marianne C. Bohr, Paris was never simply a setting.

The Park City author has spent much of her life traveling through France and writing about how unfamiliar places can alter a person’s sense of self; in her new literary novel, When Paris Whispers, due out Sept. 1 through Brother Mockingbird, she turns that longtime fascination into fiction.

Set in Paris in 1981, the novel follows 22-year-old Catrine, who arrives in the city she has dreamed about since childhood, expecting distance to offer freedom. Instead, Paris begins to unsettle the identity she thought she understood.

“France has been part of my life for a very long time, and I wanted to write about a place I knew not just as a tourist, but as someone who had lived there and experienced both the exhilaration and the occasional discomfort of being an outsider,” Bohr said.

Paris, she said, gave her exactly the contradiction she wanted for Catrine.

“It’s beautiful and romantic, but it can also be lonely and anonymous, which is exactly what she needs,” Bohr said. “She arrives thinking she’s running away from something but gradually discovers that she’s really running toward herself.”

That sense of isolation helps explain why Bohr set the story in 1981.

Without cellphones, texting, internet access, or digital maps, Catrine cannot immediately reach home or solve every problem with technology. If she becomes lost, she has to find her way. If she is lonely, she has to remain with the feeling.

“That isolation was essential to her journey toward independence,” Bohr said.

The novel begins with Catrine drifting through Paris as the voices of French writers she once read in solitude seem to echo back to her. Rather than comforting her, they begin exposing cracks in the person she believed herself to be.

After a brief romance ends in an abrupt eviction, she is left broke and unmoored. An unexpected friendship with a widowed Sorbonne professor eventually leads to an impulsive road trip to Normandy, pushing her further into questions about her past, her identity, and what she wants from her life.

Bohr drew heavily on her own experiences in France for the novel’s sensory world, including its food, sounds, streets, and rhythms of daily life. But she is clear that Catrine’s story is not autobiographical.

“I borrowed the France I knew and loved and then created a completely different life for her,” she said.

That distinction became part of the appeal of fiction.

Bohr previously wrote travel memoirs, including Gap Year Girl: A Baby Boomer Adventure Across 21 Countries, which grew out of a yearlong European sabbatical with her husband, and The Twenty-One Woman’s Trek Across Corsica on the GR20 Trail, about hiking the long-distance route across Corsica.

Moving into fiction gave her a different kind of freedom.

“In nonfiction, I’m always accountable to what actually happened,” Bohr said. “Fiction gave me permission to ask, ‘What if?’”

She could take emotions she understood personally, including leaving home, feeling untethered and discovering a different version of oneself, and place them inside a character whose circumstances were entirely invented.

“I didn’t have to tell my own story to find emotional truth,” she said.

Her years of travel writing also shaped the novel’s attention to place. In nonfiction, Bohr learned to notice the sound of streets, the smell of cafés, the quality of light and the way people move through a city. In fiction, she said, those details can do more than describe a destination.

“They can reveal character and mood and help advance the story,” she said.

At the center of the novel is a question Bohr has returned to repeatedly in her own travels: whether a person can truly escape an old life by leaving it behind.

“We’re often tempted to believe that if we can just get far enough away from our old life, we’ll become someone new,” she said.

Bohr first went to France in her 20s and remembers the freedom of being far from home. But the experience also taught her that distance does not erase identity.

“You don’t leave yourself behind simply because you cross an ocean,” she said.

That tension drives Catrine’s story. Paris strips away familiar roles and expectations, leaving her to determine who she is without the people or structures that previously defined her.

“Sometimes you have to run away to see yourself clearly, but eventually you have to stop running,” Bohr said.

Travel remains central to Bohr’s life. She began traveling frequently at age 20 and said those experiences gradually changed how she defined home.

She and her husband moved to Park City after 35 years in Maryland and quickly felt they had made the right choice.

“We chose to build this next chapter of our lives surrounded by mountains, changing seasons, and a landscape that still surprises and delights us,” she said.

But leaving remains important, too.

“As much as I love coming home, I need to go away now and then to appreciate it all over again,” Bohr said.

That movement between belonging and unfamiliarity still shapes what she wants to write about.

“I love what happens when we’re removed from the familiar,” she said. “We become more observant, meet people we never would have met otherwise, and sometimes discover parts of ourselves that are harder to see at home.”

Bohr will also hold a book signing at Dolly’s Bookstore in Park City on Saturday, Oct. 24, from 1 to 3 p.m.