I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself
One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected 11 Jun 2024
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- 11,99 €
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- Pre-Order
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The jubilant latest from MacNicol (No One Tells You This) details her transformative summer in the City of Light. After spending the height of the Covid-19 pandemic anxious and alone in her New York City apartment, a 47-year-old MacNicol jumped at the opportunity to sublet a friend's Paris apartment in 2021. She was eager for a change of scenery and an opportunity to live as "a woman who wasn't required to ask permission. Who could do as she pleased." In Paris, MacNicol ate indulgently, found lovers via dating apps, made new friends, and eventually came to view the city as "a mirror that has allowed me to see my entire self and... tak enormous pleasure in the wholeness of that person." By and large, MacNicol's escapades come across as empowering, though some may wince at her shallow description of the app-facilitated dating world as a "meat market." She's especially incisive when comparing dating at midlife to gaslighting—no matter how good one actually feels, she argues, "everyone and everything" insists that getting older means feeling worse. It adds up to an exhilarating account of finding a new lease of life.