Paris, 1978. Elaine Sciolino was a 29-year-old cub reporter for Newsweek, the junior member, and only woman, in a bureau staffed by much older men. For assignments, she got the leftovers—“soft” stuff, which in Paris mostly meant food and fashion. Newsweek happened to share an office with The Washington Post, and Sciolino’s first break came when the paper’s legendary fashion editor Nina Hyde took her under her wing. Soon she was attending prêt-à-porter shows, meeting Yves Saint Laurent and his model muses, dining at Karl Lagerfeld’s stunning Left Bank apartment. It was a glamorous introduction to journalism in the City of Light.
Then, her beat changed overnight. An obscure Iranian cleric named Ruhollah Khomeini arrived in the quiet suburb of Neauphle-le-Château in exile, and none of the senior correspondents wanted to make the trek. But Sciolino was game. Armed with charm, persistence, and chutzpah, she became the first woman—and first American—to interview the ayatollah. When the revolution erupted in Tehran, Newsweek chose her to board Khomeini’s chartered flight back to Iran. She took with her $20,000 in cash, a shortwave radio, a portable typewriter in a blue eggshell case, and one change of clothing.
“I was young and foolish and single,” she later told Terry Gross, reflecting on the dangers she brushed off as a woman journalist flying into the Islamic Revolution.
Sciolino eventually joined The New York Times, where she built a distinguished career as United Nations bureau chief, CIA correspondent, and the paper’s first female chief diplomatic correspondent, among other roles. She later returned to Paris, this time to lead the Times bureau there during the George W. Bush years—the era of “Freedom Fries.” Yet Paris was no longer just a professional assignment; it would become her permanent home, and the throughline of her next four books.
The first was 2011’s La Séduction, a sharp analysis of how seduction—not merely romantic but also intellectual, culinary, and political —infuses nearly every aspect of French life. While plenty of Americans have written about what the French can teach us (Bringing Up Bébé, French Women Don’t Get Fat, etc.), Sciolino’s was that rare book written by an American that French people could read to understand themselves. She followed up its success with a bestselling portrait of her own street, the Rue des Martyrs (2015’s The Only Street in Paris), and 2019’s The Seine: The River That Made Paris, tracing the river from its mythical beginnings as a wellspring of Gallic culture to its unlikely future as an Olympic swimming venue.
