By the summer of 2021, Glynnis MacNicol had been isolating by herself, in a small New York apartment, for 14 months. Mice scurried down the hallways of her building; when people fled, inevitably their cats had gone with them. The then-47-year-old writer was starved for contact.
So, it felt less like a whim and more like a necessity when she booked a flight to Paris, and secured a five-week apartment rental just as European countries began tentatively reopening their borders. “I’d been so alone and so untouched,” MacNicol says. “I just wanted to be alive.
” If MacNicol was hungry for human connection, Paris, a city where she’d spent parts of summers past, fed her—not just copious cheese and wine, but picnics and dance parties with friends along the Seine, and sex with younger men facilitated through a dating app called Fruitz. When one such suitor asked what she was doing in the City of Light, MacNicol replied with what would become the title of : “I’m mostly here to enjoy myself.” The memoir is perhaps more aptly described as a , given its compressed, month-ish timeline.
You could also interpret it as allegory: In her first memoir, 2018’s , 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 , 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 .
