France has long had a magnetic pull on writers, each attracted by a particular pleasure or ambition. For Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, in the 1920s, it was the stimulation of the expat community in Paris, which gave voice to the Lost Generation. For Peter Mayle, in the 1980s, it was the sunlight and lavender fields of Provence, the antidote to dreary England. For Bill Buford, in the late 2000s, it was the culinary traditions of Lyon, a city known to transform mere pot-slingers into fearsome chefs.

For Steve Hoffman, in the 2010s, the attraction was murkier. In his often magnificent, frequently moving new memoir, “A Season for That,” the James Beard Award-winning food writer follows in the footsteps of countless authors before him and uproots his life for a sojourn in France. His goal, it seems, is a cross between self-escape and self-discovery, a search for something that can’t reveal itself until it is found.

Courtesy of Crown

“A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France”

By Steve Hoffman

Crown. 358 pages

$30

Born and raised in the Twin Cities, Hoffman had a “strange, stubborn” relationship with his parents. He found release from the person he was becoming – and, crushingly, didn’t like – whenever he slipped into the language and culture of France, starting in the sixth grade. During a college hiatus, he spent nine months in Paris, during which the City of Light seduced him into believing he could escape the unbearable tightness of being Steve Hoffman.

In middle age, Hoffman had settled into a career as a tax preparer, a family man and a freelance food writer, all of which he appeared to excel at, no matter the vestigial doubts he harbored about what his life might have been. But his experiences in France lingered in memory, whispering promises that he could inhabit the role of a lifetime: an American in Paris, one who finds acceptance in a country known, however unfairly, for turning up its Gallic nose at those without a French passport.

But Hoffman and his family – wife Mary Jo, daughter Eva, son Joseph – didn’t find themselves in Paris or the golden Van Gogh landscapes of Provence during their six-month residency in 2012 and early 2013. Their budget afforded them a more modest setting: They rented a place in Autignac, in southern France. Hoffman describes the village as the “French equivalent of Des Moines,” which has less to do with Autignac’s size (population: less than 1,000) than its lack of appeal as a tourist destination.

From the start, Hoffman was determined not to play the role of visiting American, and he insisted that his children join him for the ride, even if that meant drinking Coke without ice, a French tradition. But Hoffman’s idea of immersion was something closer to cosplay – ordering the right food, following the correct grammatical rules – than full integration into the French community, at least according to Mary Jo, who assumed the thankless role of the family’s quality control inspector.

In one passage, Hoffman remembers his spouse speaking a frank, critical truth:

“‘This,’ Mary Jo said, waving her palm over the table, ‘is what you get after you’ve done the work. But you’re not doing the work. You’re just playing some character, and I don’t even like him.’”

From that moment on, Hoffman went to work. He got on his hands and knees to pick grapes during the wine harvest. He got a lesson in French business economics while working for the village butcher. He jettisoned his romantic notions of haute cuisine in exchange for the generational wealth of French country cooking, passed down through the oral traditions of local cooks and merchants. He learned to view life not as a line graph perpetually on the rise, but a seasonal cycle full of highs and lows, all to be savored in their own way.

“A Season for That” rewards patience. It’s not a memoir plotted for narrative tension. It is a book of anecdotes, day trips, asides and insights, which bump up against one another until they slowly begin to take shape. They merge into the portrait of a family, with all its messiness, affection and frustrations. The book finds meaning in everyday moments, and it’s only through these small increments that Hoffman sees the rich terroir of his own family, whether the clan takes root in southern France or in suburban Minnesota.

Hoffman spent about eight years writing “A Season for That,” and it shows in his sentences, which are so polished that you will often marvel at their brilliance. Passages about his children are particularly poignant, perhaps because Hoffman is still coming to grips with his own childhood, which seems unresolved.

“Joe is different,” Hoffman writes of his son, tenderness dripping from every word. “Something ethereal attached to him early. Something delicate and almost dangerously exposed. He has that kind of gentleness that makes a parent want to invent a better world so that he can live there in peace.”

For all his willingness to parade his sensitivities and faults, Hoffman keeps a part of himself tightly under wraps. Even as he easily doles out sympathy for his son’s frailty, Hoffman can’t extend the same affection to his childhood self. “Like something seen in peripheral vision that vanishes when you look directly at it, I cannot look straight at my boyhood self and feel love for him,” Hoffman writes.

This tension from his early years clearly drives Hoffman’s search for a life far from the cold, crystal-blue lakes of Minnesota. But it’s a tension that is largely unexplored and unexplained. It’s a heartbreaking paradox in a book that wrings so many truths from human imperfection and vulnerability.