Therapy was full. So I wrote books.
Therapy was full. So I wrote books.
A sharp, satirical look at France’s great “integration” charade.
Bilingual, biting, and borderline rude.
Integration, the French way: mildly cruel, deeply ironic, always well-documented.
What if Kafka worked in social services and had a sarcastic sense of humor?
Réveiller mon français fut une expérience… intéressante. Imaginez réveiller un ours en hibernation, mais avec des verbes irréguliers et des accords de participe passé.
Chaque conversation était un mélange d’improvisation, de mime et d’usage créatif de l’application de traduction. Je me débattais avec la syntaxe comme un chaton avec une pelote de laine, s’emmêlant dans les fils des subjonctifs et des conditionnels. Mais dans cette comédie linguistique, chaque faux pas, chaque gaffe était un pas de plus vers la maîtrise de cette langue que j’avais négligée. Redécouvrir le français était comme retrouver un vieux jouet d’enfance : un peu usé, un peu étranger, mais tellement chargé de souvenirs et de promesses. Et ainsi, dans ce joyeux bazar de réapprentissage, je me suis embarquée dans un voyage dans lequel l’amour, le français et une bonne dose d’humour étaient mes compagnons de route. La France, mon nouveau foyer, était devenue le terrain de jeu idéal pour mes aventures linguistiques, où chaque jour était une nouvelle scène d’une pièce hilarante et touchante.
En lecture et compréhension, j’étais comme une bibliothécaire chevronnée, naviguant aisément dans les méandres de la prose et de la poésie. Mais, dès qu’il s’agissait de parler, la situation se transformait en un sketch comique. Imaginez une gymnaste de niveau olympique qui, confrontée à un trampoline, se transforme soudain en Bambi sur la glace. C’était moi avec l’expression orale. Ma phobie des fautes était comme une ombre menaçante, me murmurant des horreurs à l’oreille chaque fois que j’ouvrais la bouche. « Tu vas te tromper », « Attention, un piège de conjugaison en vue !», « Alerte, subjonctif incorrect en approche !». Un véritable cauchemar grammatical.
Les premiers mois en France, chaque mot sortait avec une prudence digne d’un démineur en action. J’étais obsédée par la prononciation, prononçant chaque syllabe avec autant de soin qu’un chirurgien lors d’une opération délicate. Je me posais sans cesse des questions dignes d’une introspection philosophique : mon accent était-il trop marqué ? Trop évident ? Les gens allaient-ils me comprendre, ou allaient-ils me regarder avec cette expression polie mais perplexe, typique de quelqu’un qui tente de déchiffrer un code secret ?
Imaginez cette scène, celle qui fait souvent le tour des réseaux sociaux : vous vous tenez devant une boulangerie, soudainement perdu dans les méandres de la langue française.
Est-ce que « baguette » est féminin ou masculin ? Pour éviter tout faux pas, vous optez pour la formule neutre : « Deux baguettes, s’il vous plaît. » Puis, une fois en possession de votre achat, une question vous assaille : « Mais qu’est-ce que je vais faire de la deuxième ? » Typiquement, un cas de panique linguistique français où même une simple visite à la boulangerie se transforme en épreuve. Honnêtement, le français, avec ses règles tortueuses, peut donner le vertige. Prenez un « e », un « a », et un « u », mélangez-les, et vous obtenez un « o ».
Imaginez maintenant toutes les règles de grammaire qui défilent devant vos yeux alors que vous tentez simplement de demander quelque chose de simple. Un vrai casse-tête ! Car devant le quotidien, le simple devient compliqué. Vous pouvez correctement épeler, écrire et prononcer « anticonstitutionnellement », mais un petit lapsus vous fait demander un « pain avec céréales » et non « pain aux céréales ». Voilà comment, dans la vie de tous les jours, même les plus doués peuvent trébucher sur les subtilités de la langue française.”
A sarcastic guide to surviving a world that’s proudly, loudly wrong.
From flat-Earth social media users to PhD-level confidence in zero research.
Because facts are out, and vibes are in. Welcome to the apocalypse.
A venomous, witty, and painfully accurate dissection of modern-day stupidity, where self-proclaimed gurus, flat-earthers, crypto-evangelists, and barefoot parenting influencers unite in their loud, proud, and gloriously uninformed existence.
This book explores how ignorance got rebranded as bravery — and why being confidently wrong has never been so profitable.
Knowledge.
That tedious, time-consuming, completely avoidable burden that people used to waste their lives chasing. In the old days, being right about something required a painful process of learning, thinking, and—God forbid—occasionally admitting you were wrong. A truly barbaric practice.
But thankfully, we have evolved.
We now live in a far more enlightened era, where expertise is for suckers, and confidence is the only qualification that matters (Confidence: because facts are for quitters!) Who needs years of study, peer-reviewed research, or even a basic understanding of a subject when you can simply say things loudly and watch people nod along? Why waste time on facts when gut feelings and blind certainty get the job done faster?
If you’ve ever lost an argument simply because you didn’t know what you were talking about, don’t worry. That’s an amateur mistake. The trick isn’t to know more—it’s to care less.
And best of all? Science is on your side. Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger (1999) discovered a phenomenon so bafflingly stupid, yet so perfect for modern discourse, that they had no choice but to name it after themselves: The Dunning-Kruger Effect.
In short: the less you know, the more you think you know. That’s why the guy who barely passed high school biology now aggressively lectures NASA about why space is fake. It’s why the woman who has never read a medical journal is now correcting doctors on vaccine science. It’s why your uncle, who last read a book in 1983, is completely convinced he understands geopolitics better than people who actually work in diplomacy.
And the best part? The people suffering from Dunning-Kruger have no idea. They aren’t simply wrong—they are completely convinced they are the smartest people in the room.
And with that kind of delusion, who needs facts?
A psychological autopsy in pink and teeth.
How to survive a soft-spoken thief with decorative throw pillows.
A sharply , emotionally messy tale of one couch, one personality thief, and no boundaries.
It starts with empathy. Then softness. Then sadness that somehow becomes your job to manage.
Told with dry wit and suspiciously accurate flashbacks, this book explores what happens when someone builds their identity out of your attention — and gets deeply offended when you reclaim it.
There was a stretch of years that didn’t feel like a chapter — just a blur of becoming.
I don’t have a name for those years. They weren’t wild or ridiculous to us—they were just what life looked like: messy, fast, sleepless. Full of burnt pasta, bad wine but expensive whisky, too many cigarettes, and the kind of closeness that made you forget to lock the door.
Everything felt urgent and unimportant at the same time—like a rehearsal for a life we hadn’t learned to live. Nothing mattered the way it eventually would. Maybe that’s why it all felt so big: because we didn’t yet know what could break us.
That era had a tempo — messy, bright, and unsustainable.
It started around 2005 and ran like a pirated movie until somewhere near 2013. (…)
By 2010, the group had years of shared dinners, breakups, rented cars and forgotten birthdays behind it.
Conversations didn’t orbit him; they bent toward him like satellites each time something slipped out from our group. And we, fluent in empathy and allergic to cruelty, mistook it for something unintentional—for someone who’d suffered and could still show up for others.
But it wasn’t loyalty. It was surveillance, with a hint of self-branding.
Whenever someone in the group grew too close to a new partner, a new friend, a new purpose—he shifted. Never loud. Just enough to change the temperature.
He wouldn’t say, “You’re ignoring me.” He’d say, “I just hope they’re good to you.” He’d lean in with lines like, “She seems fake, don’t you think?” or “He’s cute, but… something feels off.” Then came the classic, the subtle dagger wrapped in velvet: “I just want to make sure you’re not being used. I’ve been there.”
What he really meant was: you’re not looking at me enough, and I’m going to fix that.
We brushed it off. Sensitive. Caring. Deep. We mistook emotional entitlement for emotional presence and paid for it.
Because people like Mr. Confetti don’t grow beside you. They wrap around you.
And when you begin to build anything, careers, relationships, boundaries, they don’t step aside. They step in.
As we started evolving, he became sharper, quieter, hungrier. Our progress became his discomfort. (…)
There was something fluid about him.
He never felt out of place, no matter who was in the room.
He had this way of syncing with whatever energy was already there.
If the mood was quiet, he lowered his voice. If the group was joking, he delivered the perfect comeback.
He didn’t try too hard—that was part of the charm. He just adjusted. Like light finding a corner.
He remembered birthdays. Brought wine that somehow matched the vibe. Asked the kind of questions that made you feel interesting—even if the topic wasn’t.
There was a warmth to him, but it didn’t spill. It was contained. A practiced kind of openness that made you feel like you were discovering something rare.
He remembered things you forgot you ever told him—your cat’s name, your third-favorite wine, the way you phrased things when your ex left.
He paid attention in a way that made you feel seen.
And when someone sees you like that, you let them stay.
Of course you do.
Again, our group didn’t match. But that was the point.
Some were my friends. Some were his.
The rest kind of belonged to both.
His people weren’t strangers to us for long. They slid in gradually, through him—colleagues, old classmates, friends from somewhere you didn’t quite catch.
They didn’t crash in; they settled. Some of them were quieter, others louder, but they all had that same familiarity he carried—that effortless ability to blend into the background until they were suddenly part of the main cast.
We accepted each other the way you accept second cousins at a wedding: no questions, just plates and chairs.
The more people showed up, the less I noticed what was changing.
A brand-new constellation was forming again, different shape, same gravity. We orbited each other out of habit, history, and proximity.But I didn’t know that among those stars, one of them would eventually try to swallow the whole sky.
© Frida Niklaus