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By the summer of 2021, Glynnis MacNicol had been isolating by herself, in a small New York apartment, for 14 months. Mice scurried down the hallways of her building; when people fled, inevitably their cats had gone with them. The then-47-year-old writer was starved for contact. So, it felt less like a whim and more like a necessity when she booked a flight to Paris, and secured a five-week apartment rental just as European countries began tentatively reopening their borders.
“I’d been so alone and so untouched,” MacNicol says. “I just wanted to be alive.”
If MacNicol was hungry for human connection, Paris, a city where she’d spent parts of summers past, fed her—not just copious cheese and wine, but picnics and dance parties with friends along the Seine, and sex with younger men facilitated through a dating app called Fruitz. When one such suitor asked what she was doing in the City of Light, MacNicol replied with what would become the title of her new memoir, out on June 11: “I’m mostly here to enjoy myself.”
The memoir is perhaps more aptly described as a tale, given its compressed, month-ish timeline. You could also interpret it as allegory: In her first memoir, 2018’s No One Tells You This, MacNicol reckoned with turning 40 and caring for her dying mother in the absence of the expected husband or children. (It made me cry on a plane.) Yet in I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, a spiritual sequel, MacNicol’s life is framed not by lack, but abundance. She not only defies convention, but richly enjoys doing so, dedicating 260 pages to the pleasures of being single and childfree. Even the verbiage is crucial: in the recent past, she might be described as unmarried and childless.
“There’s so much shame and guilt around women having a good time,” MacNicol, now 49, tells me over our best American approximation of a leisurely French lunch, at New York’s Cafe Luxembourg. “I want to provide one happy story that isn’t tied to finding a partner or a wedding or a baby. Let’s have one that’s like, I’m just being hedonistic and naked and eating whatever I want.” (On the eve of Ozempic’s cultural takeover, MacNicol gleefully documents her delicious meals of fresh bread and gooey chevre with salami.)
With I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, MacNicol, a veteran writer for The New York Times and many other publications, artfully indicts the ageist industrial complex through her own lived experience. “I have found most of what we’re told about getting older to be a lie,” she says. “As you age, you are told you become less attractive or won’t enjoy sex, or so many women say, ‘Are you invisible yet?’ And I’m like, really? I feel like I’m a 14-year-old boy.”
To end her pandemic-induced celibacy, in Paris MacNicol turned to Fruitz—an app “like Tinder, but less serious, if that’s possible,” she quotes a friend saying in the book. Users self-identify by produce: “Cherry is ‘to find your other half.’ Grape is ‘for a glass of wine with no trouble.’ Watermelon is ‘no seeds attached,’” while peach, known to elicit the dirtiest messages, is for “straight hookups,” she writes.
As a watermelon, MacNicol discovered that the societal male gaze she’d been warned would see her as undesirable did not align with the many real-life men—including at least one 27-year-old—who gazed adoringly at her naked body. It was a revelation to discover that she was “attractive to literally everyone,” MacNicol says, sipping her rosé and reaching for a fry. “Why would I ever second-guess this about myself?”
Not only was her age not a detriment, but she suspects it was the draw: “I think part of their attraction is the confidence that you have in your 40s,” MacNicol tells me. “My body does not look like what it looked like at 25, but I am less concerned with it. I know what I enjoy. I know how to enjoy myself, which, at 25, I didn’t.”
Still, some friends—even enlightened ones—expressed trepidation about her casual Parisian sex, warning MacNicol that men were only interested in her because they didn’t have to commit. “And I said, ‘Yes, exactly,’” she recalls with a contented smile. She wasn’t—and isn’t—dating in pursuit of marriage, babies, or a financial contract, but, as radical as it may still be, for her own enjoyment.
“We desexualize older women, and I think one of the reasons for that is when there’s no fertility tied to sex, you really are focused on the pleasure,” MacNicol notes. It’s a threatening concept in an American political landscape that still systematically penalizes women’s sexual freedom, even if it shouldn’t be. But, then again, the idea that MacNicol does not follow societal scripts—and dares to be happy about it—has long made a particular kind of woman (usually white and married) bristle.
“I’ve come to suspect I’m some sort of proof,” she writes in I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself. “Proof, perhaps, that a New York Times wedding announcement does not shore up matters of life the way one was convinced it might? Though this feels too simplistic. What really irks this woman, I’ve come to realize, is that I appear to be enjoying myself. I have veered off the narrow path laid out for women to be successful in the world, and it turns out I’m fine. Sometimes better, sometimes worse, but mostly fine.”
Even selling the story of her Parisian jaunt proved complicated. Editors praised the manuscript as engrossing, MacNicol says, but then declined to bid on it. They seemed to seek a familiar, tidy, linear narrative arc, a proverbial box in which to place her. “We don’t understand women alone as anything but a problem in need of a solution,” MacNicol offers. “I think they wanted: This one terrible thing happened and I went here in search of love and I found it.”
In fact, MacNicol did find love—lots of it—through a tight-knit group of Paris-based, also single and childfree girlfriends. They welcomed her out of pandemic isolation and into an ongoing conversation over dinner, drinks, and bike rides, traversing the city and traveling to the sea—their own moveable feast. Through irresistible stories and never-earnest preaching, MacNicol argues that marriage isn’t the only path to family.
Yes, “this book is about sex and cheese and sleeping with younger men… but I wanted it to be about the true reflection of what pleasure actually means in this stage of life, and how much of that is rooted in community and friendship,” she says. She points to Rhaina Cohen’s recent book The Other Significant Others, which considers friendship—not marriage—as society’s primary, prized relationship. During her first few weeks in Paris, MacNicol would bail on Fruitz dates because she couldn’t bear to leave the pleasure of her friends’ company: “I just was so happy to be with my friends who spoke the same language, figuratively speaking,” she says.
For mothers and wives in the throes of caretaking, MacNicol’s independence, her freedom to travel to Paris at all, may feel downright fantastical. But it also offers a profoundly hopeful counter-narrative: that age can come with an expanding, rather than a limiting, of possibilities. “As I’m turning 50, I feel like I am weirdly 10 years ahead of where most of my friends who have kids that are between seven and 12 will be in 10 years,” she says. “I’m having the kind of time we associate with 65 to 70-year-olds who are out the other end, but I just got here sooner because I didn’t have the childrearing years to get through.”
MacNicol has long searched for narratives that reflected her experiences, but she’s found them only scantly—in French Nobel winner Annie Ernaux and author Deborah Levy; in the 1978 Jill Clayburgh-led dramedy An Unmarried Woman, in which the protagonist flings her arms around singledom. (Is it telling that it’s virtually never available to stream?) On an exploratory jaunt through Paris, MacNicol and a friend set off in search of plaques commemorating famous artists—Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, photojournalist Lee Miller—and learn about their illustrious sex lives and connections to one another, including Colette dating her young stepson and de Beauvoir taking three lovers at the same time. MacNicol instigates the question: Why do we know so much about Hemingway and Fitzgerald and so little about iconoclastic women?
While wandering the Louvre, MacNicol found herself in front of a painting that would come to grace the cover of her book: L’Odalisque by François Boucher, in which a woman (thought to be Boucher’s wife) lolls on a blue velvet bed. “Her nightdress is raised up to expose her ample bottom” and “her head is turned coquettishly over her shoulder,” MacNicol writes. “She most definitely seems to be enjoying herself.” MacNicol was transfixed, reminded of a few of the cheeky photos on her camera roll, recently exchanged with Fruitz paramours.
Alas, Amazon flagged the cover for nudity and warned it will not promote I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself as a result, and Instagram is shadow-banning it for the same reason—never mind the thong-clad rears of all manner of influencers. “It’s not just the nudity of the picture,” MacNicol argues. “It’s connected to the framing of pleasure.” When given the choice to change the cover, however, MacNicol didn’t budge.
Across our lunch table, the waitress brings dessert: a tin of warm cinnamon sugar doughnut holes. “Delicious,” MacNicol says, biting into one. I agree: delicious.
