Glynnis MacNicol is far from the only person who spent the pandemic in complete isolation, but her experience – 16 months alone in a tiny Manhattan apartment as a 46-year-old single woman without children – was especially punishing.
When she is offered the chance to sublet a friend’s apartment in Paris, she books a flight right away and announces on her arrival that she has “moved into an abundance mindset”. In France, she swiftly begins hooking up with men she matches with on a dating app called Fruitz, having felt starved of touch for too long.
Subtitled “One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris”, this somewhat self-indulgent memoir of a liberated middle-aged woman’s adventures might appeal to lots of readers, but it wasn’t really my cup of tea. In fact, I would have preferred a nice cup of tea over reading about MacNicol’s ceaseless need for self-gratification.
Her unapologetic self-possession is impressive, her confidence admirable. And yes, women who embrace this kind of sexual agency are often unfairly judged, especially compared to men. Irrespective of that caveat, her choices appear risky, reckless, wildly trusting and self-indulgent – even without factoring in a global pandemic.
There are jarring tonal shifts throughout. In one chapter, MacNicol recounts a rough night out when she abandoned her friends and got lost in the Bois de Boulogne. Her sulky narration – “I don’t want to stay. I don’t want to have a bad night. I don’t want to not have fun. And I don’t have to not have fun. So I leave. And now how to get myself out of the forest” – is oddly affecting. Just as the tension begins to build, she veers wildly off course: “It’s shocking to understand how recent the notion of time travel is.” The digression breaks the spell entirely.
Elsewhere, she comes off as overly enamoured of herself. “In every pool I swim, my stroke is remarked upon, my sharp flip turns marvelled at,” she writes. On seeing an old video of herself: “I watch it again and again and stare at my own beauty, which leaps off the screen at me … My jawline, my eyes, my hair. I find myself coveting myself.” Moments like these come across less as reflections on ageing or self-acceptance and more as unchecked self-regard.
Even the back cover blurb leans into overstatement: likening MacNicol to Nora Ephron and Deborah Levy, the former a comedic genius, the latter a razor-sharp chronicler of interior lives, is quite a stretch. This book seems written primarily for the author’s pleasure and occasionally forgets that the reader is also there.
