Glynnis MacNicol on Her Latest Memoir, Which Explores One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris

This conversation today with my new friend Glynnis MacNicol is so empowering, as is her latest book, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris, which came out June 11. In Glynnis’ latest memoir, she takes us to Paris during the pandemic—a Paris she calls “quiet Paris”—where, because of COVID, there’s no tourists coming in, and because it’s August, all of the Parisian locals are headed out. It was a magical experience, and Glynnis kind of had the city to herself. In this book and in our conversation today we dissect why it’s still so taboo for women to want to experience pleasure—which Glynnis does during this season in her life, leaning into, as she writes, “the audacity of being selfish.” She writes in the book that “The thing women fantasize about most is freedom”; we talk about that in our conversation today, and I was struck by Glynnis’ ability to so vividly make her reader feel as though they were right alongside her in Paris, experiencing all the city has to offer in a very unique time. In this book, Glynnis writes about the way society regards women over 40; she will turn 50 in early September, and she writes that 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? After Glynnis—who, at the time, was 46 and unmarried with no children—spent 18 months in isolation, from March 2020 to August 2021 as the pandemic raged on, this memoir sees her break out of her tiny Manhattan apartment and across the Atlantic to Paris; what follows is, as the book reads, a decadent, joyful, unexpected journey into one woman’s pursuit of radical enjoyment, with her weeks filled with food and friendship and, yes, sex. Glynnis also write the 2018 memoir No One Tells You This about turning 40 and also created and hosted the podcast Wilder: A Reckoning with the Legacy of Laura Ingalls Wilder; she’s written everywhere from The New York Times to The Guardian, The Cut, Town & Country, The Daily Beast, Elle, and The New York Daily News, among others. I can’t wait for you to hear what she has to say.

I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris by Glynnis MacNicol