How Fargo of You: True Stories from a Place Stranger than Fiction

Memoir from Marc de Celle of his family's first five years in Fargo. Having always lived in either Arizona, California or Florida, Fargo was a big change -- but the biggest shock wasn't the climate, it was the culture. The locals frequently left de Celle speechless, until he finally figured out what to say: "Oh. How Fargo of You."

From the Introduction:

I had no burning desire to visit Fargo. But my wife, Charlene, had decided we were going. Her best friend Melody, who I liked very much and our kids adored, now lived in Fargo. So we came. It was the summer of 2001 and we were on vacation.

Our lives would never be the same.

Until then, all I knew of Fargo, other than the fact that my wife's best friend had moved here, was that a movie with dumb criminals and people talking in goofy accents had been titled after it. Oh, and it got really, really cold....

That was all I knew of Fargo.

So our first visit, nearly a quarter of a century later, held many pleasant surprises. No dumb criminals - in fact, about the lowest crime rate in the country. No goofy accents, don'cha know. Great weather (we came in June). And a much bigger surprise, as you'll read in Chapter One...