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 confounding. MacNicol was among the first wave of female Gen X memoirists to grapple with a historic shift in women’s life trajectories, as marriage and motherhood rates declined. Modern women enjoyed heady freedoms and a dizzying array of choices, but, as these writers discovered, it was not always easy to navigate life without a script. It was not always easy to invent a life from scratch. “If this story wasn’t going to end with a marriage or a child, what then?” MacNicol tellingly wrote. “Could it even be called a story?” That crisis was, first and foremost, a crisis of narrative.

In her new book, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, MacNicol revisits this theme of feeling untethered from a storyline, as she recalls trying to adapt No One Tells You This for television. Female producers loved it and, with a show in mind, pressed her to identify the problem the heroine was working to solve. They needed a narrative arc, but MacNicol was unable to supply one. She ultimately determined there was no narrative; her book was simply about “figuring out how to live when there was no role you could determine to play, or script to follow.” That is not a satisfying story, though, and neither is this latest outing. MacNicol is a wonderful writer, and the backdrop to her French adventure could not be more cinematic. But her book poses a series of questions she seems uninterested in answering.

The travelogue opens with MacNicol on a hookup app, Fruitz, viewing detached, high-risk sexual encounters through the lens of female empowerment. Although she claims to relish the ensuing liaisons — which, she stresses, are all consensual — it quickly becomes apparent that she would rather spend time with her Parisian friends, talking about literature and art, picnicking on the Seine, biking around the emptied-out streets, or delighting in carafes of rosé, plates of gooey chèvre, and cups of chocolat chaud.

As MacNicol chronicles these decadent days, the reader is left to contemplate all that she evades. To engage in sporadic casual sex, MacNicol must override her own reluctance. She keeps cancelling dates at the last minute, but even when she decides to go through with them, she remains largely unenthusiastic. “I have nothing to lose,” she writes, resigning herself to one such tryst. Contemplating another potential date, she observes, “There are no friend plans tonight; the evening stretches before me like an arid desert. This will not do.” Consider, too, the most miserable rendezvous contained in the book, involving an unsmiling, angry stranger — an interlude that “takes resolve” to understand as “anything other than a request for punishment.” The encounter leaves MacNicol with bruises, yet she rationalizes that it somehow makes her feel “seen.”

Similar ambivalence surfaces around emotional intimacy. After one hookup misses his train and spends the night, holding her as they fall asleep, she worries about such tenderness: “In the movies sex workers always forbid kissing as if that is the trapdoor to heartbreak. But it seems to me the sleeping embrace is far more risky.” Given an aversion to her own vulnerability, it is perhaps unsurprising that MacNicol seems to have a limited appetite for vulnerable men. She complains that many want her to be a confidante, a sounding board for their anxieties about divorce, parenting, or open marriages. At the first sign of need, she opts out, deleting them from the app (though she feels brutal doing it).

MacNicol eventually finds her groove sleeping with a series of twentysomething men and getting high on the attention. One of her friends warns her that she’s at risk of getting hurt —“of veering a bit too close to the cliff.” MacNicol wonders if she is, in fact, fooling herself about the nature of all that attention and the satisfaction she derives from it. She wonders, too, how she would know if she was: “How are we supposed to know we’re in the right place if the destination is not a recognizable one?”

This is, of course, the central question of the book. And it gives rise to others: Did the crushing loneliness of lockdowns ever cause MacNicol to second-guess her life choices? Does the financial precarity — getting by as a middle-aged writer in New York with “terrible freelancer health insurance” and no security net — make her rethink championing the single-living ethos? Would she feel differently about casual sex if one of the Parisian men she invites back to her sublet turns out to be violent or gives her a sexually transmitted infection? Does she ever feel regret when these men disappear afterwards? Does she ever long for a domestic relationship, however non-traditional a form that might take? Finally, is there not an inherent conflict between the autonomy she prizes (“Once you’re hooked on having control over your life, it’s a hard drug to kick”) and the desperate desire for connection that has driven her to Paris in the first place?

Celebrating her birthday at the beach with friends, MacNicol comes close to facing such doubts. “I sometimes have to work to understand my life not as one long missed opportunity,” she concedes. “The writing career not entered into earlier, when pay rates could actually support a life. The self-knowledge, so long in coming. The sex not had. The love not given or taken. But not today.” That choice —“not today”— defines I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself. It precludes storyline, character development, resolution. In its wake, there are no revelations, no insights, no transformations. In this context, what pleasure can be found is a distraction from answering life’s more pressing questions. Pleasure is not a radical act here but a diversion.