In 2003, Kathleen Flinn lost her executive-level job and decided to spend her life savings attending Paris’ famed culinary school, Le Cordon Bleu. A part-time Anna Maria Island resident, Flinn, now 41, wrote a book about the life-changing experience, The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry. (The title was inspired by a French chef’s advice about cutting onions.) The memoir, a funny and touching look at her struggles to adapt to the school, a foreign country and a burgeoning romance, has won good reviews, and Flinn is now working on another book. She says her dream was born in the early 1990s when was writing obituaries at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune: “I decided I wanted my own obituary to read, ‘She earned a degree from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris.’”—Hannah Wallace