I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself

April 29, 2024
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. Agent: Lucy Carson, Friedrich Agency.

May 1, 2024
A woman's quest for pleasure in a post-pandemic Paris. In August 2021, MacNicol, author of No One Tells You This, embarked on a journey through Paris in pursuit of radical joy. Unmarried with no children, she longed for a change of scenery and change in pace, and she felt herself grasping for excess after nearly 16 months of isolation in New York City. In Paris, she explored the tourist-free streets, absorbing abundance and light among her new friends and mysterious lovers. Pulling references from literary giants such as Joan Didion and Nora Ephron, MacNicol poses many important questions about what it means to be a woman free of tethers. Finding beauty in the slow moments along the Seine, or passing by the Louvre, she absorbed all that Paris has to offer. She ate delicious food, met handsome men, and had exciting sex, finally allowing herself to feel satisfied. Her story is not without depth. "I look at this young woman, twenty-three years old, and how all her selves have been split up too," she writes about an acquaintance. "Not by isolation, but by too much connection. Too much knowledge. The way that the internet has robbed her of discovery. Of being allowed to not know, to have to find out on your own." Women today are expected to know and be everything, but at what cost? Are your 20s the only acceptable age to grow and evolve? These are only some of the questions MacNicol brings to the table, as she challenges modern expectations of the right to pleasure and enjoyment and being one's true self in an ever-darkening world. Blending humorous commentary and wit with vivid stories of love, lust, and good food, MacNicol generously invites readers into her Parisian paradise. A fun memoir filled to the brim with humor and vulnerability.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 15, 2024
In the summer of 2021, desperate to start reconnecting after the isolation of the pandemic, New York City-based writer MacNicol resumed her annual month-long sojourn in Paris. This entertaining account documents her hedonistic adventures as she immerses herself in everyday French luxuries: tourism, rendezvous with old friends, good wine and decadent food, picnics, bike rides, and lots of sex. A single, fortysomething woman uninterested in marriage or having children (an experience strikingly chronicled in No One Tells You This, 2018), MacNicol emerges as a relatable raconteur, blending in literary and historic references while vividly recreating scenes, menus, and sexual encounters with satisfying detail. She's also a grown-up who's comfortable with her various appetites, candidly sharing her newfound sense of ease with her maturing body and increasing distaste for pretense in relations, physical or otherwise. MacNicol and her friends also discuss career and lifestyle choices, feminism, and economic and social norms. By the end, like the author, readers will be ready to return to real life satisfied, smarter, and enriched.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 21, 2024

MacNicol (No One Tells You This: A Memoir) contemplates the nature of connection and joy in this candid, intimate memoir that's presented in the form of essays. When travel restrictions between the United States and Europe eased in 2021 after the peak of the COVID pandemic, MacNicol, craving interpersonal connection, took her usual yearly trip to Paris. In Paris, she reflected on the different types of connections she's made--ranging from navigating French bureaucracy with strangers to dancing at an impromptu concert to trips with close friends, biking, swimming, and casual sex--and the happiness they yielded. She compares these experiences with the previous year's situation, when COVID forced her to self-isolate in New York City. MacNicol, who describes herself as a middle-aged, unmarried, childless woman, argues that joy is difficult to find for her demographic, as society passes judgment or ignores women who identify the way she does. She uses culture and pop culture references--particularly art, film, and books--to enhance her narrative. VERDICT A sensual and vibrant essay collection and memoir that spotlights the different types of connections people yearn for and enjoy.--Rebekah Kati

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