French pop music
During her years in France, Simmons started investigating French pop music and was particularly taken with Serge Gainsbourg. This too would result in a book - the highly lauded "Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes" (Helter Skelter Publishing, 2001 ). J. G. Ballard chose it as his book of the year. It was published in the UK in 2001 and translated from the English original into ten languages. In 2015 an expanded digital edition of "Serge Gainsbourg: A Fistful of Gitanes" was released, in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Japanese.