The Way It Was

About the Book

THE WAY IT WAS draws a picture of the last half century with its craters and peaks there at your fingertips, shared and explored by caring witnesses who took sides all the way through. It was not by chance that someone called out “Mazel Tov, Palà”, as the news of Franco’s demise swept through a Paris gallery opening.

Their lives touched on the vital chords of our times. The story that emerges is humane, often funny, acute and shaded with grace for they knew they were blessed. To contradict the Chinese proverb, they lived in interesting times and enjoyed every minute. The Way It Was shows the reader how.

About the Author

DOLORES PALÀ was born in New York in 1928 and was raised there along the Hudson with summers with her Canadian mother’s family in Nova Scotia. She went to first Catholic then public schools in the city and briefly to NYU till a series of happy accidents took her to a job at the nascent United Nations in Lake Success in 1947 followed by a scholarship to study International Relations in Paris in 1948. A few months later she met Juan Palà, then a young Barcelona artist in Paris on a French scholarship, at a St. Valentine’s Day dance in 1949.

What follows is their life for two from the early post war period through to the edge of today’s as yet unnamed war of religions. The young couple were part of the Cold War scene through her job and their return to Paris from New York in the mid fifties.

Juan’s work as a sculptor put them in the center of a period of artistic renewal that Paris was witness to in the latter half of the 20th century. They brought up two bilingual children, Christopher, a prominent U.S. investigative journalist and Suzy, an English professor in Paris.