I’m Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself is delightful new memoir, out this week, which tells the story of Glynnis MacNicol, a child-free and single woman who heads to Paris after a year of Covid lockdown in New York to eat and touch her way around the world’s horniest city. It is as delicious as you can imagine.
Let me briefly set you the scene of domestic drudgery that kick-started my reading experience: Covid has ripped its way through my small family, and all of us are still recovering. My toddler is teething, my husband is feverish, and our recently adopted stray cat has just shat her way through the laundry. I am at the bad end of a work to-do list that I am weeks – months – behind on, and it’s raining again.
The perfect ingredients for a pity party, right? But not me. Because I am not here. My body may be in Auckland, but my spirit is in Paris, hours into audiobook version of the divine and decadent memoir, I’m Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit Of Pleasure In Paris.
Firstly, there’s the cover:
Come on!!
And then there’s the premise. New York-based writer Glynnis MacNicol has emerged from the first year of the Covid lockdown – it’s spring 2021, and she hasn’t been touched for a year. Child-free and single, Glynnis has stayed behind in New York while those who can flee have, and the hallways of her apartment block are so empty, she can hear the rats start to run around. In fact, the person she has the most regular contact with during this time is the local exterminator.
New York is empty, lonely, and tragic – and then there is a brief window where summer arrives, the vaccine lands and the promise of a new ‘Roaring Twenties’ is dangled. Emboldened by this sudden surge of momentum, Glynnis books her regular apartment in Paris – where she has travelled and written books in the past – to enjoy a summer of pleasure. Of course, Covid has other plans. Before she has even left, the Covid-19 variant Delta is starting to cause destruction, and the whole trip is almost derailed before it starts. Glynnis is aware that leaving might mean being trapped outside of America, but the risk of more time spent alone in a rapidly shutting down New York is more vicious. So she goes.
‘I’m mostly here to enjoy myself’ is the answer she gives to one curious Parisian once she does arrive in the City of Lights. Almost empty of tourists, the city is filled with equally pent-up locals who are looking to experience life and each other after months of solitude. If you’re worried this is a book about Covid, don’t be – it’s just the starting block. This book is a literal romp dedicated to pleasure – Glynnis is in Paris for five hot weeks to eat and touch her way around the world’s horniest city. This book is DELICIOUS, both in terms of the evocative descriptions of French food, but also in its purely pleasure-focused content.
Glynnis joins the French dating app Fruitz, where you identify what you’re looking for by selecting your representative fruit – she’s a watermelon, ‘no seeds attached.’ The book opens with her relaxing in a Parisian park, wondering if she should go and meet the man she has been chatting with on the app, who has told her about the rent-by-the-hour hotels available in Paris and wants to meet her there. She doesn’t know his name, his app photo is only a profile. She debates, and then she goes. Why not?
Your own ‘why not’ may come up loudly here, but this is a memoir where everything goes right. And it’s a memoir that still tells a fairly untold story – as a single, child-free woman in her late 40s, Glynnis is happily solo in a society that simply doesn’t know what to do with her.
As she writes in the spectacularly titled New York Times piece Men Fear Me, Society Shames Me, and I Love My Life, she is: “Alone, unmarried, childless, past my so-called prime. A caricature, culture would have it, a fringe identity; a tragedy or a punchline, depending on your preference. At the very least a cautionary tale.” But her lived reality is completely different to this spinster stereotype, she writes.
“It’s not just in enjoying my age that I’m defying expectations. It’s that I’ve exempted myself from the central things we’re told give a woman’s life meaning — partnership and parenting. I’ve discovered that despite all the warnings, I regret none of those choices.
Indeed, I am enjoying them immensely. Instead of my prospects diminishing, as nearly every message that gets sent my way promises they will — fewer relationships, less excitement, less sex, less visibility — I find them widening. The world is more available to me than it’s ever been.”
That NY Times piece went viral, the comments were interesting (euphemism) and it hit a nerve for many. Glynnis is very good at doing this – her last book, No One Tells You, was about turning 40 and being single and child-free… and realising that it was actually fan-f–king-tastic. It came out in 2018, two years into the Trump presidency and the #MeToo movement, and was a breath of fresh air then, to read about a woman enjoying herself without a marriage or motherhood. Consider where the US is now when it comes to women’s reproductive rights. For Glynnis to be writing about enjoying sex more than ever as she now approaches her 50th birthday, it feels quietly revolutionary.
An excerpt from I’m Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself is currently sitting in the most-read stories on the Guardian UK, where Glynnis writes about how a literal male gaze on her naked body subverted what she had been told to think about herself from society’s male gaze. Texting a younger man she had been dancing with earlier in the night, she invites him round for sex and he immediately says yes. Glynnis writes:
“As my dress comes off, and then my bra, I consider what my nude, 46-year-old body might look like to outside eyes. It does not look like the bodies we are told should be naked. It is not a defying “can you believe it?” body. It has not fared as well as my face. It has shouldered the highs and the plunges of life, of grief, and loss, and confusion, and self-deception, and the reliable joys of food, and the months where not exercising was definitely the healthier option. It is the body of a person who can no longer skate by on no health insurance. Who must follow up on every scan. Who cannot leave home even for one night without tweezers. Who can barely conceive of wearing heels because of the pain they cause my feet.’
Her younger Parisian hook-up cannot believe his luck:
“I look up to see him staring at me and I catch that look on his face, the look we are relentlessly told is reserved only for the rarified who have followed the proper regime. Applied the toners and moisturizers and serums in the correct order. Lifted the right amount of weights. Done cardio for the correct amount of time. Excluded the right amount of sugar or fats or meats. Followed each set of new rules as they appear. Restricted themselves. Contorted themselves. Done the work. Remained young. It is the look of a man gazing upon a naked female body they have been invited to partake in. A mix of lust, excitement, gratitude and relief.
He steps back for a moment, dropping my bra on to the couch and removing his shirt. He takes another long look at me. Ah, the enjoyment of being enjoyed. “Amazing,” he says with a grin before coming closer. And I think, Yes. Yes. You are fortunate my clothes are off. It is amazing.”
!!!
As part of the press tour for I’m Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself, Glynnis has spoken about how hard it was to get her memoir sold because it didn’t end with a marriage, or a relationship, or her time in Paris wasn’t the result of some tragic breakdown.
As she tells Vogue, “We don’t understand women alone as anything but a problem in need of a solution. I think they wanted: This one terrible thing happened and I went here in search of love and I found it.”
But no, Glynnis just has a great time. She doesn’t leave Paris engaged, or chastened, or a new person. She leaves reinvigorated and more convinced than ever that, as a child-free woman in her late 40s, she can have her cake and eat it too.
I’m Mostly Here To Enjoy Myself is available now on e-readers and as an audiobook. The physical book isn’t being released in NZ but you can try and order it in from your local bookstore.