My friend Lena loves The Life Before Us by Émile Ajar/Romain Gary so much that she bought me a copy of it. It’s always risky to recommend a book you love to a friend. It’s also tricky to be the friend receiving such a recommendation. Reading taste is so subjective, and just as I hope my friends will like my other friends, I always hope my friends like my book recs.

Lena and I are more often in alignment with our fiction taste than not, so this didn’t feel as much like a risk. Still, it was a big relief that I enjoyed this book as much as I did.

The Life Before Us works well largely because of Momo, the memorable and endearing child narrator. Momo, short for Mohammed, is the bastard child of a sex worker living in Paris in the 1970s. He lives in an illegal orphanage run by Madame Rosa, a retired sex work and Holocaust survivor. While Momo and Madame Rosa often insult each other and bicker, they have a deep, loving bond. You can’t help but root for them.

The book is rather episodic, with snippets of life in their working-class, immigrant neighborhood. I fell in love with many of the characters who dip in and out, especially Monsieur Hamil, a retired carpet salesman who mentors Momo, and Madame Lola, a trans woman from Senegal who is often the first person to show up for Momo, Madame Rosa, and the other children in her care.

It’s a beautiful picture of how people on the margins show up for each other, while also being provocative, hilarious, and at times, quite vulgar. Some content and language did not age well. But The Life Before Us walks a fine line, and ultimately, this book has a big, kind heart at its core.

I’m not sure what to make of the author Romain Gary, who had quite the life. He was already a major writer in France when he made a sudden career turn in the 70s and started writing under the pen name Émile Ajar. He had his younger cousin pose as Ajar publicly. This caused problems for both of them, but more for the young cousin. Gary was also married to the actress Jean Seburg, a fact I somehow completely missed when Lena told me about this book.

I’ve long been fascinated by Jean Seburg, who also had quite the life. I’ve been meaning to rewatch her iconic film Breathless, then watch Richard Linklater’s recent film Nouvelle Vague about the making of Breathless, so maybe this will motivate me to revisit the French New Wave. I have the impression that Gary and Seburg had a tumultuous and unhappy marriage, and like many “great men” writers, Gary was, perhaps, not the greatest father, husband, or even cousin.

That said, Momo, Madame Rosa, and their neighbors will long stay with me. Momo is such a singular narrator and truly, truly funny. I doubt I would have picked up this book on my own, and that’s the joy of book recommendations when they go right. And even if they go a little wrong, I think there’s still some fun to be had in sharing our favorite books with each other. So thanks, Lena.