
I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself
One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris
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Narrated by:
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Glynnis MacNicol
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By:
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Glynnis MacNicol
About this listen
“A delight, the literary equivalent of a long catch-up with a brilliant friend.”—New York Times
“One of the most talked-about books of the year.”—Gayle King
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.
©2024 Glynnis MacNicol (P)2024 Penguin AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
One of W Magazine’s Best, Most Talked-About Books of 2024
One of Romper’s 12 New Books On Our Summer Reading List
One of Goodreads’ Readers’ Most Anticipated Summer Books
One of TIME’s 25 New Books You Need to Read This Summer
On Zibby Owens’ Ultimate Summer Reading List
One of Eater’s 10 Food-Filled Beach Reads for Your Summer Vacation
One of BookRiot’s Book Critics’ Most Anticipated Summer Reads
One of LitHub’s The Ultimate Summer 2024 Reading List
One of NPR’s Book of the Day
“A journey of radical pleasure filled with good friends, good food, good wine, and good sex. . . . MacNicol finds purposeful, decadent joy beyond the confines of society’s expectations.”—W Magazine
“The memoir is perhaps more aptly described as a tale, given its compressed, month-ish timeline. You could also interpret it as allegory: In her first memoir, 2018’s No One Tells You This, 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 I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, 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 pleasures of being single and childfree. . . . For mothers and wives in the throes of caretaking, MacNicol’s independence, her freedom to travel to Paris at all, may feel downright fantastical. But it also offers a profoundly hopeful counter-narrative: that age can come with an expanding, rather than a limiting, of possibilities. . . . Delicious.”—Vogue
“Sex, though, is only a tiny slice of MacNicol’s pleasure. The book is mainly a travelogue through Paris, where MacNicol stays often and has a close ‘Sex and the City’-type circle of girlfriends. One pleasure for the reader is her casual style of writing, which seems to mimic the pace of life. . . . The digressions feel neither self conscious nor literary but relaxed, implying that one source of a single woman’s pleasure is having the time to follow the flow of her own thoughts.”—Washington Post
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Performance
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Molly Roden Winter was a mother of small children with a husband, Stewart, who often worked late. One night when Stewart missed the kids’ bedtime—again—she stormed out of the house to clear her head. At a bar, she met Matt, a flirtatious younger man. When Molly told her husband that Matt had asked her out, she was surprised that Stewart encouraged her to accept.
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engaging but contradictory
- By Eyal Goldshmid on 03-15-24
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All Fours
- A Novel
- By: Miranda July
- Narrated by: Miranda July
- Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Miranda July’s second novel confirms the brilliance of her unique approach to fiction. With July’s wry voice, perfect comic timing, unabashed curiosity about human intimacy, and palpable delight in pushing boundaries, All Fours tells the story of one woman’s quest for a new kind of freedom. Part absurd entertainment, part tender reinvention of the sexual, romantic, and domestic life of a forty-five-year-old female artist, All Fours transcends expectation while excavating our beliefs about life lived as a woman.
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would not recommend
- By Amazon Customer on 05-21-24
By: Miranda July
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This American Ex-Wife
- How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life
- By: Lyz Lenz
- Narrated by: Lyz Lenz
- Length: 7 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Studies show that nearly 70 percent of divorces are initiated by women—women who are tired, fed up, exhausted, and unhappy. We’ve all seen how the media portrays divorcées: sad, lonely, drowning their sorrows in a bottle of wine. Lyz Lenz is one such woman whose life fell apart after she reached a breaking point in her twelve-year marriage. But she refused to take part in that tired narrative and decided to flip the script on divorce.
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Someone Needed To Write This
- By Laurie on 03-03-24
By: Lyz Lenz
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Splinters
- Another Kind of Love Story
- By: Leslie Jamison
- Narrated by: Leslie Jamison
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.
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Felt too self indulgent - even for a memoir
- By Kristin H on 09-27-24
By: Leslie Jamison
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The Rich People Have Gone Away
- A Novel
- By: Regina Porter
- Narrated by: William DeMeritt, Shayna Small
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Brooklyn, 2020. Theo Harper and his pregnant wife, Darla, head upstate to their summer cottage to wait out the lockdown. Not everyone in their upscale Park Slope building has this privilege: not Xavier, the teenager in the Cardi B T-shirt, nor Darla’s best friend, Ruby, and her partner, Katsumi, who stay behind to save their Michelin-starred restaurant. During an upstate hike on the aptly named Devil’s Path, Theo divulges a long-held secret—and when Darla disappears after the ensuing argument, he finds himself the prime suspect.
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descriptions of food
- By Lilly Daniel on 08-16-24
By: Regina Porter
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Ambition Monster
- A Memoir
- By: Jennifer Romolini
- Narrated by: Jennifer Romolini
- Length: 9 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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After years of relentlessly racing up the professional ladder, Jennifer Romolini reached the kind of success many crave: a high-profile, C-suite dream job, a book well-received enough that reporters wanted to know the secrets to her success, and a gig traveling around the country giving speeches on “making it.” She had a handsome and clever husband, a precocious child. But beneath this polished surface was a powder keg of unresolved trauma and chronic overwork. It was all about to blow.
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Love love love
- By James on 06-07-24
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A Season for That
- Lost and Found in the Other Southern France
- By: Steve Hoffman
- Narrated by: Steve Hoffman
- Length: 10 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake.
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Genuine
- By clang on 12-22-24
By: Steve Hoffman
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My Side of the River
- A Memoir
- By: Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Camarillo Gutierrez
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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Born to Mexican immigrants south of the Rillito River in Tucson, Arizona, Elizabeth had the world at her fingertips. She was preparing to enter her freshman year of high school as the number one student when suddenly, her own country took away the most important right a child has: the right to have a family. When her parents’ visas expired and they were forced to return to Mexico, Elizabeth was left responsible for her younger brother, as well as her education.
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A well known story
- By Enedina Hernandez on 03-25-25
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I Shouldn't Be Telling You This
- (But I'm Going to Anyway)
- By: Chelsea Devantez
- Narrated by: Chelsea Devantez
- Length: 8 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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There are things Chelsea Devantez probably shouldn’t be telling you. Many of them are in this book: some are embarrassing (like when she tried to break her three year spell of celibacy using a guide of seduction tips). Some are confessional (getting sentenced to the “hell hill” at Mormon church camp). Some are TMI (a series of outrageous doctor visits that ended with one doctor misdiagnosing her as “pregnant.” Woopsies!).
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A large missing piece
- By F. Pryne on 06-18-24
By: Chelsea Devantez
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Worry
- A Novel
- By: Alexandra Tanner
- Narrated by: Helen Laser
- Length: 7 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s March of 2019, and twenty-eight-year-old Jules Gold—anxious, artistically frustrated, and internet-obsessed—has been living alone in the apartment she once shared with the man she thought she’d marry when her younger sister Poppy comes to crash. Indefinitely. Poppy, a year and a half out from a suicide attempt only Jules knows about, searches for work and meaning in Brooklyn while Jules spends her days hate-scrolling the feeds of Mormon mommy bloggers and waiting for life to happen.
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worst book I've ever?
- By Trish♡ on 05-16-24
By: Alexandra Tanner
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The Hypocrite
- A Novel
- By: Jo Hamya
- Narrated by: Claire Kinson
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Unabridged
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August 2020. Sophia, a young playwright, awaits her father’s verdict on her new show. A famous author whose novels haven’t aged as gracefully into the modern era as he might have hoped, he is completely unaware that the play centers around a vacation the two took years earlier to an island off Sicily, where he dictated to her a new book. Sophia’s play has been met with rave reviews, but her father has studiously avoided reading any of them.
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Consistently boring
- By lifelong learner on 10-09-24
By: Jo Hamya
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The Great River
- The Making and Unmaking of the Mississippi
- By: Boyce Upholt
- Narrated by: Gabriel Vaughan
- Length: 10 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Over thousands of years, the Mississippi watershed was home to millions of Indigenous people who regarded "the great river" with awe and respect, adorning its banks with astonishing spiritual earthworks. But European settlers and American pioneers had a different vision: the river was a foe to conquer. In this landmark work of natural history, Boyce Upholt tells the epic story of human attempts to own and contain the Mississippi River, from Thomas Jefferson's expansionist land hunger through today's era of environmental concern
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a great summation of the Great River
- By Michael H. Link on 07-27-24
By: Boyce Upholt
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My Own Magic
- A Reappearing Act
- By: Anna Kloots
- Narrated by: Anna Kloots
- Length: 9 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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Despite what appeared to be a glamorous existence full of globetrotting adventures, behind the scenes, Anna felt invisible in her own life. Consumed by a marriage that left no space for her own desires and creativity, she chose to reframe the failure of her marriage as an opportunity to begin again.
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It lacked The Magic
- By JPIII on 08-05-23
By: Anna Kloots
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You Could Make This Place Beautiful
- A Memoir
- By: Maggie Smith
- Narrated by: Maggie Smith
- Length: 7 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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In her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith explores the disintegration of her marriage and her renewed commitment to herself in lyrical vignettes that shine, hard and clear as jewels. The book begins with one woman’s personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes.
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Beautiful, relatable, profound
- By Betty Blue on 04-16-23
By: Maggie Smith
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The Salt Path
- A Memoir
- By: Raynor Winn
- Narrated by: Raynor Winn
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Just days after Raynor Winn learns that Moth, her husband of 32 years, is terminally ill, their house and farm are taken away, along with their livelihood. With nothing left and little time, they make the brave and impulsive decision to walk the 630 miles of the sea-swept South West Coast Path, from Somerset to Dorset, through Devon and Cornwall. Carrying only the essentials for survival on their backs, they live wild in the ancient, weathered landscape of cliffs, sea, and sky.
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Not happy…..
- By Debbie Frizzell on 09-12-21
By: Raynor Winn
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Picture Perfect Autumn
- A Novel
- By: Shelley Noble
- Narrated by: Em Grosland
- Length: 11 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Dani Campbell is the latest darling of the Manhattan art scene. As a self-taught photographer, Dani is loving every minute of her sudden popularity, but has no idea how she got there, or a clue as to how to stay. On a shoot at an antiques barn, she discovers an envelope of old photos and sees in them what her photos are missing. Her search for their source leads Dani to a small Rhode Island town, a dilapidated American Gothic beach house—and Lawrence Sinclair.
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I liked the story very much
- By Izzy on 03-17-24
By: Shelley Noble
What listeners say about I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- EJL_LaLa
- 06-21-24
Insightful, better to read than listen
The author shares some striking and relatable insights about being a single and child-free woman in her late 40s, especially during the pandemic, and the essential and beautiful role that female friendships play in one’s life. Her narration is difficult to listen to, however, especially the butchering of French words and phrases. Nothing ever seems to really happen (though I suppose this is life) and she often veers off on tangents (about women’s genitalia in art, for instance) during which my attention drifted and/or I was tempted to skip ahead. All in all an interesting read but I am not sure I’d recommend this to anyone.
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- J. Butler
- 07-27-24
Not what I expected.
I did not dislike this book. But I’m not sure I liked it either. Extremely well written and read.
This is not a summer/beach read. It gave me things to think about that I will long be thinking about.
Lots of French tidbits that are not translated.
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- August
- 07-30-24
Over thought?
Several interesting points. Some of the viewpoints are very singular. The comparisons to women of history and artwork is a great idea but over done.
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- Maria B
- 06-17-24
Great book, pronunciation of French words was cringe
I loved the writing, and this is probably nit picky, but the pronunciation of French words was distractingly bad. For someone who’s been to Paris multiple times and who is curious about the world, you would think she’d at least learn how to pronounce basics like “vin” correctly. That aside, this was a great mix of personal narrative, history, and meditation on the joy of growing older as a woman. I’d definitely recommend this book (but brace yourself or go for the written version if you’re a French speaker).
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- B
- 07-05-24
Well written and relatable
I found this book to be fun, relatable, inspiring, and empowering. Highly recommend. I also don’t mind her voice as it feels familiar and endearing. Enjoy!
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- MDG
- 06-16-24
Professional Narrator Needed
I couldn’t even get past chapter one. This author should not have insisted on narrating her own book. Lifelessly read. Not the first time I couldn’t finish a book read by the author.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 08-31-24
Birthday trip sounded lovely
Really loved the scene of her celebrating her 47yh birthday on the island in France
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- Amazon Customer
- 07-16-24
Boring
The narrator had very limited tone and very crisp style, not easy to listen to.
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- Kathleen Aldrich
- 11-23-24
Loved it!
Went by like a breeze. Glynnis puts you in Paris and along for her pleasurable ride!
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- Emily
- 02-12-25
HER Story
Ok ive read enough reviews thats i have to give my two cents. This woman wrote about HER wants, HER needs, HER connection to the world in which SHE lives. It’s her story about a specific time in her life. It is her truth and it is hilarious people are so mad about it. We truly hate confident single women. I was enamored and enjoyed HER story from beginning to end.
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