Detours: Janet Flanner

"If I've omitted any of your lovers, pray excuse me, Madame," the Judge said ironically at her trial. "The list is already so long."

Janet Flanner, an American writer and journalist, was the Paris correspondent for The New Yorker in the years before and after World War II. Paris Was Yesterday, 1925 - 1939, is a collection of her articles.

On a hot day in the summer of 1980, I sat in an apartment with cinderblock walls, my sprained ankle propped up on a pillow. With nothing else to do…