French Connections

In the summer of 2021, Glynnis MacNicol, a forty-six-year-old writer from Toronto, was living alone in a 450-square-foot New York City studio apartment. As a result of pandemic restrictions, she had little in‑person contact with anyone other than her building’s exterminator. In fact, she had not been touched by another person in well over a year. She was consumed by a hunger for connection, for physical contact. So, as soon as travel was possible, she fled to Paris, intent on re-entering the land of the living. She then spent five weeks indulging in all the City of Light had to offer, from food to flings. The resulting book is framed around the pursuit of pleasure as a radical act. But at its core, the memoir is about something else entirely.

To understand this difference, we must return to MacNicol’s No One Tells You This, from 2018. In it, she described a mid-life crisis: turning forty as a single, childless woman and finding life without a road map...