Perseverance and the Power of Untold Stories 

When Robin moved to Paris in 2016 to pursue a master’s degree at The American University of Paris, she didn’t do so for love or an Instagrammable version of expat life.  

She came with a clear goal: to create a life outside of the “American way.” What she found in Paris would be exactly that, but even more transformative than she could have imagined. After being diagnosed with breast cancer twice in three years, on September 16, 2025 she shares her story with us in a powerful new memoir about resilience and identity. 

Originally from the Washington, D.C. area, Robin attended Howard University on a full scholarship. Self-described as a “doer,” Robin describes her time at Howard as eye opening —confessing that she lost her scholarship during her freshman year due to over-socializing, or in other words, partying too much. 

Her forthcoming memoir, Surviving Paris: A Memoir of Healing in the City of Light, begins with this mind-bending contrast; the height of joy undercut by an unexpected health crisis. But her story is not only about illness. It’s about facing vulnerability without being fluent in the native language and discovering community in unlikely places. 

Though Robin had completed her studies, she credits AUP for playing a crucial role in supporting her through that time. “Thankfully, I still had the private insurance AUP required us to get, and the University’s health services really helped me navigate what came next,” she shared. “I wasn’t a student anymore, but the AUP network still held me up.” 

Always a writer, Robin described a childhood of writing short stories and poems with aspirations of one day writing a book. The one thing she never counted on was the topic. Despite the subject material, Robin believes her book is accessible and a good story for many people, not only cancer survivors.  

Her story disrupts the dominant narrative found in many books about life in Paris. “So many books about moving to Paris are about falling in love, having French children, and dealing with funny bureaucratic mishaps,” she said with a smile. “But I couldn’t find any stories about people like me; Black women, in their 30s, building new lives and facing major health issues abroad.” 

The process wasn’t easy. Starting the book during the first remission, she stopped the project believing that no one would be interested in her cancer story. It wasn’t until her second diagnosis when she decided this was a story that must be told. 

But completing it meant diving back into the emotional weight of illness. For Robin, the emotional labor of writing went beyond simply recounting medical details. As a Black woman telling a deeply personal story, she was doing something rarely seen in mainstream publishing. “There’s a particular kind of vulnerability involved in putting this out there, especially when so few stories like mine have been told.” 

In writing her story, Robin was not only documenting a life-altering experience, but she also claimed space in a literary landscape that too often leaves out Black women. Writing a memoir that admits vulnerability when the status quo is to pretend like everything is fine is an act of resistance. It is insisting that stories of Black womanhood abroad not only exist but deserve to be told in full. 

 “I kept journals throughout, but actually writing the book required me to revisit the hardest moments of my life,” she said. “My editor and beta readers kept encouraging me to go deeper, to let go of the journalist’s instinct to hold emotion at arm’s length.” 

Her AUP education played a meaningful role in this shift from journalism to personal narrative. Though she had been working in media long before attending the MAGC program, Robin says the coursework and the international context helped her expand her perspective. “The development communications class with Professor Tanya Elder really stuck with me. Concepts like top-down versus bottom-up communication stayed with me long after.” 

Robin’s story is a reminder that life in Paris is not always romantic. But it can be transformative. 

“There’s a saying, ‘Paris is always a good idea.’ I agree, but I also think people need to come with their eyes open. Things will be harder than you expect. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing.”