Paris as a Playground of Pleasure
Paris as a Playground of Pleasure
A conversation with "I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself" author Glynnis MacNicol
For many people, the year following strict pandemic lockdowns felt like coming out of hibernation. As the proverbial chains came off, some went wild. Others were more cautious and set new priorities for their lives. Some did a mix of a both, like the writer Glynnis MacNicol.
After enduring nearly a year of isolation and a punishing lack of human touch, MacNicol boarded a plane for Paris in August, 2021 to sublet a friend’s apartment for the month. She was 47-years-old and on a mission—100% enjoyment. An exploration of pleasure. Close contact.
As she wrote in a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, she was “alone, unmarried, childless, past my so-called prime. A caricature, culture would have it, a fringe identity; a tragedy or a punchline, depending on your preference. At the very least a cautionary tale.” By the time she landed at a relatively empty CDG, she was “desperate — not for partnership but for connection.”
Paris, I reminded myself, prioritizes pleasure. I dived in. Cheese, wine, friendships, sex — and repeat.
Her new memoir hitting shelves next week, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, is an absolutely delightful romp that documents her liberated period of self-exploration. But the message goes far beyond one of self-care and unabashed enjoyment— the book challenges the idea that to have a compelling story as an older, single woman sans enfants, the journey (wherever it takes places) must necessarily lead to love.
I read it, loved it, and immediately asked Glynnis to answer a few questions.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Your previous book and essays explored singledom in your forties— not only accepting it but celebrating what it allows in your life. Your new book takes a much different and uninhibited look at that state, following a period of intense, pandemic-imposed solitude. Both, however, challenge what we’ve been told since time immemorial about women’s desires and conventions of adult life. Do you consider this a true follow-up or documentation of a much different phase in your life?
It didn't start out as a sequel to No One Tells You This. I didn't go to Paris that summer with any intention of recording what I was up to, or turning my experiences into something. I was literally in a frenzy after so much time alone, and simply looking for every type of satisfaction I could find. However, I've kept a journal since I was a little kid, and a few months after I returned, I was rereading my journal entries from those weeks. I enjoyed them so much, I just thought, “oh, I think there's something here.” I'd spent the pandemic craving fun stories. People on Twitter were reading Tolstoy or Kafka or taking the opportunity to do War and Peace read-a-longs or whatever. And I was like, I just want to read biographies about parties.
Simultaneously, I was reading Deborah Levy's The Cost of Living and Annie Ernaux, and a little bit of Rachel Cusk and really thinking about how the depth of experience for women is often found in what we might be conditioned to consider smaller moments.
The trip felt like a good timeframe and in addition to enjoying my journals, I had begun to think of that period as significant in ways that I hadn't entirely grasped while I was there. I wanted to capture that experience and provide an alternate idea of what pleasure looks like, particularly at an age where you're sort of cultured to think it’s all going to get worse.
In hindsight, though, now that I have some distance, I definitely see it as a continuation of my constant drive to map out these middle-aged years where so little guidance is provided.
Paris and pleasure are obvious bedfellows and can mean everything and anything. I think of bacchanalian depictions of Parisian life throughout history, the gourmands, the drunks, the dancers and escorts, the flâneurs, but there are endless ways to see the city as a playground for self-enjoyment. Was Paris the only possible setting for your post-lockdown summer of self-exploration? Would it have been as enticing if you hadn’t already spent time in the city and developed some friendships?
I’m very hesitant to paint Paris as a utopian ideal or France as a utopian ideal. Obviously, it’s not. But I think for Americans in particular, the combination of the social net, the food, and this idea of relaxation – which is not always true and is certainly not true for everyone there – does exert a real pull. That said, I do think that enjoyment is built into the French system as a right. Whereas in America it has to be earned. And not just earned financially, but earned through labor, through hard work. There’s this sense in America you must do something to deserve pleasure, as opposed to you deserve it because you live on planet earth.
So in that sense, I think it's not that this story couldn't have taken place elsewhere, or that people elsewhere don't experience pleasure, but because I was both more aware of it in Paris, and it was more accessible to me there, it became sort of the thesis of my time there.
And a major part of that enjoyment are my friendships. That’s true of my life. My friendships are central to everything. And I was particularly desperate for them after so much isolation. It was the fact I had a community of friends in Paris who I missed, in addition to loving the city, that really pulled me there that summer.
You reference some influential historical figures— Edith Wharton, Lee Miller, Colette— who have similarly explored Paris as a playground for all manner of pleasures. To what extent was it important to you to know, or at least highlight to readers, that you are part of a long line of women who have found some form of personal liberation in the city?
I think we often learn about iconic and accomplished women in isolation, or in relation to the men in their lives, and not in relation with one another. I find that really frustrating, even angering. We have no problem seeing men as contemporaries: Hemingway and Fitzgerald are the easy references for this in Paris. But we rarely know how trailblazing women who are alive at the same time interacted with one another.
I’m always looking for some version of the life I’m living now to be reflected back to me in the culture. Not that I’m iconic, obviously. But just in terms of adventure, and age, different choices. To be able to see that provides a way to see yourself in the world, one that offers both guidance and comfort. It’s frustrating that I feel like I've gotten to this age and I only stumble upon these things because I’m looking for them, I want them to be woven into mainstream culture more obviously.
In that sense, I was trying to provide a bit of what I feel I miss. We are part of a larger compelling narrative. Here’s what we can learn from that and what we can pass on.
I loved this idea of adventure allowing us to become different versions of ourselves— a thought by Simone de Beauvoir in her book America Day by Day, that you included. “I’m leaving my life behind. I don’t know if it will be through anger or hope, but something is going to be revealed—a world so full, so rich, and so unexpected that I’ll have the extraordinary adventure of becoming a different me.” I know I felt that when I moved to Paris (and it’s only become clearer all these years later). Did you get the keen sense you were trying on a different identity that summer or was it unlocking something in you that was always there and you hope(d) would endure?
Truly, that summer, I was just in such a crazed state from being so alone I think I was operating on instinct. But, generally speaking, absolutely. The thrill of travel, and one of the reasons I love road trips, is you get to step outside yourself and transform, even just for a short period of time.
Paris for me has moved beyond a place I think of as a holiday destination. I spend so much time there, it feels like a really wonderful secondary life that I’m able to access when I land. That said, I do think Paris allows me to access different parts of myself and also let go of others. I’ve lived in New York for so long, the grooves of the person I am here are quite deep. It’s fun to leave some of those habits behind, or reconsider them from a distance.
I also think as a woman in your forties, you've likely already been a variety of different women. Both your body, and the world’s expectations of you, shift dramatically from decade to decade. I'm not sure that's entirely true for men.
The last book was a lot about being a caretaker to my mother. About all the children in my life, and the various roles I play in theirs. And also the different ways I function as a support system in my friends’ lives and they in mine. And then thinking through who I am on my own. I do think women are constantly trying on different outfits, or being asked to, and one of the frustrations with how all women are reflected in culture is we're afforded so few roles when, in fact, all of us are playing so many different roles daily.
As much as this book is about a woman pursuing pleasure, it is also about ageing and how the state of being a woman nearing and over fifty can either free you from burden (pressures to say yes, expectation to behave a certain way…) or overwhelm with the tacit pressure to find (or fake) youth wherever possible. Parisians have always struck me as being both hemmed in by such pressures (the anti-aging serums and cellulite or wrinkle creams basically accost a person entering a pharmacy) and apt to reject them. Did you feel like you could better exist as yourself in Paris, even given these entrenched “beauty” standards? Or do you think that the “exercise in gaslighting”, which is how you describe about ageing in the book, is a universal phenomenon?
I am not French. So I’m speaking from an outside perspective that people there may not share. But I do think that the French ideas regarding women and age, and sexuality and agency, and the power that comes with all of that, is not diminished by the culture in France to the degree it is America where it's almost entirely erased. Certainly, we’re all vulnerable to the idea that we lose worth as we age. But it’s always been easier for me to see age as something powerful when I’m in Paris – literally, I feel like when I walk around Paris, I’m constantly encountering chic, vital older women.
Sidenote on the French pharmacy: I think over the course of the pandemic Americans became even more obsessed with French skincare. And so part of what I experience when I go into pharmacies now in Paris and see the repackaging of certain products, is that someone in the marketing department of these French skincare brands got the memo and have repackaged it for an American audience, not necessarily for Parisians?
The cover, so perfect and so scorned by social media algorithms! I understand it’s been blocked by uneducated robots for its “pornographic” nature. What led you to use L’Odalisque by François Boucher, and was it a hard sell with your publisher?
The terror of the bare bottom! I write in the book about first coming upon that painting at the Louvre. I was so struck by it. When my publisher asked me to put together a sort of dream board of images to send to the cover designer, I included it. When we got this cover as one of the options to choose from I was over the moon.
We got the first hint it might be a problem when Amazon flagged to us they didn’t promote nudity, (which they seemed to have come around on, by the way. The book is now an editor’s pick). But Penguin stood by it. That the Instagram algorithm has such an issue with it has been a surprise. My theory is it’s the combination of the image with some of the language attached to it like enjoyment and pleasure. But who knows? I actually interviewed a woman who wrote a book on the history of the butt about why it’s so controversial. The butt is fascinating!
In one chapter, you write, "Paris feels so unknowable because it does not ask one to have a destination at all times. It’s fine just to be. To wander.” What are some of your most preferred areas to do so?
It might be easier to list the places I try to avoid :) I try to steer clear of Blvd Haussmann in the area of Galeries Lafayette. It’s always so crowded and there are few trees. Similarly, the area up by the Moulin Rouge can be exhausting. And Montmartre, in the tourist months, sadly, has started to feel a bit like Disneyland.
Otherwise, I’m fairly happy to wander everywhere, and then look at my phone and see how far I am from where I actually think I am! I would also add, it’s difficult to extract my bike from this conversation. I love to walk Paris as much as everyone else. But the truth is I know it best by bike at this point. Knowing a city by bike is another fluency (my French is shamefully abysmal, but I’m fluent en vélo).
Sex aside, what public spaces might make your list of I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, pleasure-driven favorites?
Truly the thing I most enjoy in Paris is sitting in parks, which sounds so simple. I live between two major parks in New York, but I never sit in them. I run through them, I bike through them, I walk through them. But I rarely sit. I mean I might do it for 10 minutes to eat something, but unless you’ve planned a picnic it's not really part of the mentality of New York. So my favorite thing to do in Paris is to sit. My favorite park is Monceau. I also love the Jardin des Plantes; I truly believe it has the best light in Paris for selfies. The amount of selfies I've taken in that park is slightly obscene, I practically need a special hard drive for it. Of course, I love Luxembourg Gardens. My favorite thing is to walk through the local market, get lunch, and sit in the park and eat and read. So basic, but so satisfying.
A huge thank you to
! You can order her book here and see her on tour at the events shown below.