I didn't leave corporate. I was told to leave.
At 28, I went blind on a train bound for Hamburg — days before starting my first job in corporate America. The doctors needed my medical history. In the era of closed adoptions, I didn't have any.
That search for medical records became something much larger: a journey into biological roots, identity, and the haunting question of where — and to whom — a person truly belongs.
...I found my biological family. I found answers. I eventually wrote a memoir about it — Searching for Zinnias, now on Amazon, Apple Books, and Barnes & Noble.
Then, thirty years later, a cardiologist finished what Germany started.
January 2023. Seattle ER. Four words: "Your job is killing you."
Within a year I was living in a paid-off 17m² apartment in Paris. I didn't have a guide. You do.
35 years of auditing. 42 years of France.
I spent 35 years in internal audit at Fortune 100 corporations and Big 4 firms — the person sent in to evaluate whether things were actually as good as they looked on paper. I was methodical, skeptical, and very hard to fool. I wrote a lot of reports.
France had been in my life since I was 17. A forged signature on a student exchange application. A French boy named Emmanuel arriving two weeks later. Quebec, where I understood nothing but something clicked anyway. A château wedding. 42 years of returning, each time staying a little longer, understanding a little more.
The audit instinct and the France obsession turned out to be the same thing: I was always trying to find out what was real, and whether it was worth staying for.
The whole arc — the blindness, the biological search, the corporate years, the Paris escape — is in my memoir, Searching for Zinnias.
17m². Paid off. Paris.
I had the apartment gutted, removed a 120-year-old plaster ceiling to gain a sleeping mezzanine, and ended up with a loft that works. No car. Metro pass. Top-notch affordable healthcare. A city built for joie de vivre. In early 2024 I moved in and made the dream a reality.
Now I scout it for you.
Not as an expat blogger with a Substack. Not as a travel influencer. As a former auditor who spent 42 years falling in love with France — and who now lives here full time, with a methodology, a framework, and boots on the ground.
I help anglophones outside France figure out which French city fits your life, which neighborhood to scout first, and whether the Airbnb they're considering is actually what it claims to be. I bring the same instincts I used to audit Fortune 100 companies — checklists, scoring, on-site inspection, written reports — to the question of where you belong in France.
That's not something you'll find anywhere else. And it's exactly what most people need before they make the biggest life decision they've ever made.