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I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself
- One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris
- Narrated by: Glynnis MacNicol
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
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I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself
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Summary
“A delight, the literary equivalent of a long catch-up with a brilliant friend.”—New York Times
“One of the most talked-about books of the year.”—Gayle King
When you’re a woman of a certain age, you are only promised that everything will get worse. But what if everything you’ve been told is a lie?
Come to Paris, August 2021, when the City of Lights was still empty of tourists and a thirst for long-overdue pleasure gripped those who wandered its streets.
After New York City emptied out in March 2020, Glynnis MacNicol, aged forty-six, unmarried with no children, spent sixteen months alone in her tiny Manhattan apartment. The isolation was punishing. A year without touch. Women are warned of invisibility as they age, but this was an extreme loneliness no one can prepare you for. When the opportunity to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris arose, MacNicol jumped on it. Leaving felt less like a risk than a necessity.
What follows is a decadent, joyful, unexpected journey into one woman’s pursuit of radical enjoyment.
The weeks in Paris are filled with friendship and food and sex. There is dancing on the Seine; a plethora of gooey cheese; midnight bike rides through empty Paris; handsome men; afternoons wandering through the empty Louvre; nighttime swimming in the ocean off a French island. And yes, plenty of nudity.
In the spirit of Nora Ephron and Deborah Levy (think Colette . . . if she’d had access to dating apps), I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is an intimate, insightful, powerful, and endlessly pleasurable memoir of an intensely lived experience whose meaning and insight expand far beyond the personal narrative. MacNicol is determined to document the beauty, excess, and triumph of a life that does not require permission.
The pursuit of enjoyment is a political act, both a right and a responsibility. Enjoying yourself—as you are—is not something the world tells you is possible, but it is.
Here’s the proof.
Critic reviews
One of W Magazine’s Best, Most Talked-About Books of 2024
One of Romper’s 12 New Books On Our Summer Reading List
One of Goodreads’ Readers’ Most Anticipated Summer Books
One of TIME’s 25 New Books You Need to Read This Summer
On Zibby Owens’ Ultimate Summer Reading List
One of Eater’s 10 Food-Filled Beach Reads for Your Summer Vacation
One of BookRiot’s Book Critics’ Most Anticipated Summer Reads
One of LitHub’s The Ultimate Summer 2024 Reading List
One of NPR’s Book of the Day
“A journey of radical pleasure filled with good friends, good food, good wine, and good sex. . . . MacNicol finds purposeful, decadent joy beyond the confines of society’s expectations.”—W Magazine
“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. . . . 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. . . . Delicious.”—Vogue
“Sex, though, is only a tiny slice of MacNicol’s pleasure. The book is mainly a travelogue through Paris, where MacNicol stays often and has a close ‘Sex and the City’-type circle of girlfriends. One pleasure for the reader is her casual style of writing, which seems to mimic the pace of life. . . . The digressions feel neither self conscious nor literary but relaxed, implying that one source of a single woman’s pleasure is having the time to follow the flow of her own thoughts.”—Washington Post