Weekend reads: The great escape

In Glynnis MacNicol's latest memoir, casual sex serves as a distraction from answering life’s most pressing questions

Here at Lean Out, we’ve spent the past few years working to understand the break between men and women — a break that came into sharp focus during this year’s presidential election. We’re currently doing a weeks-long podcast series on the challenges facing modern men, from declining education and employment to rising rates of suicides, overdoses, and loneliness. So far, we’ve heard from journalist Zaid Jilani on why zero-sum thinking gets us nowhere and pollster Daniel Cox on the growing gender divide in politics and society. “For a lot of the young men that we talk to, they feel a little bit adrift and there is no one ready or willing to throw them a life preserver,” Cox told me.

We are also striving to shed light on what’s going on with women. We’ve been tracking the rise of a Very Online feminism that is hyper-focused on individual freedom — often to women’s detriment. (I’ve written about this ethos here and here, and on “toxic femininity” for the journal Fairer Disputations here.)

The counterproductive nature of this form of feminism is especially glaring when it comes to sex. Per Arthur Brooks in The Atlantic:

Notably, casual sex lowers happiness for most people. That is particularly true for women, who are 21 percent more likely than men to say that a hookup ultimately makes them feel lonely, 19 percent more likely to say that it makes them unhappy, and 14 percent more likely to say that it makes them feel regret.

Following this line of inquiry, I want to share a recent piece I wrote for the Literary Review of Canada on a new memoir, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris.

Author Glynnis MacNicol belongs to a cohort of single, childless Gen X women that have been thinking through what it means to navigate life without a clear roadmap. It’s a dilemma I’m familiar with, having made a radio documentary for the CBC on it almost a decade ago — but I have found the conclusions my fellow writers have come to at best unsatisfying and at worst deeply depressing. MacNicol’s latest outing unfortunately falls into the latter camp. I’ll let you read why below.

French Connections: One writer’s indulgent detour

In the summer of 2021, Glynnis MacNicol, a forty-six-year-old writer from Toronto, was living alone in a 450-square-foot New York City studio apartment. As a result of pandemic restrictions, she had little in‑person contact with anyone other than her building’s exterminator. In fact, she had not been touched by another person in well over a year. She was consumed by a hunger for connection, for physical contact. So, as soon as travel was possible, she fled to Paris, intent on re-entering the land of the living. She then spent five weeks indulging in all the City of Light had to offer, from food to flings. The resulting book is framed around the pursuit of pleasure as a radical act. But at its core, the memoir is about something else entirely.

To understand this difference, we must return to MacNicol’s No One Tells You This, from 2018. In it, she described a mid-life crisis: turning forty as a single, childless woman and finding life without a road map confounding. MacNicol was among the first wave of female Gen X memoirists to grapple with a historic shift in women’s life trajectories, as marriage and motherhood rates declined. Modern women enjoyed heady freedoms and a dizzying array of choices, but, as these writers discovered, it was not always easy to navigate life without a script. It was not always easy to invent a life from scratch. “If this story wasn’t going to end with a marriage or a child, what then?” MacNicol tellingly wrote. “Could it even be called a story?” That crisis was, first and foremost, a crisis of narrative.

In her new book, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, MacNicol revisits this theme of feeling untethered from a storyline, as she recalls trying to adapt No One Tells You This for television. Female producers loved it and, with a show in mind, pressed her to identify the problem the heroine was working to solve. They needed a narrative arc, but MacNicol was unable to supply one. She ultimately determined there was no narrative; her book was simply about “figuring out how to live when there was no role you could determine to play, or script to follow.” That is not a satisfying story, though, and neither is this latest outing. MacNicol is a wonderful writer, and the backdrop to her French adventure could not be more cinematic. But her book poses a series of questions she seems uninterested in answering.

The travelogue opens with MacNicol on a hookup app, Fruitz, viewing detached, high-risk sexual encounters through the lens of female empowerment. Although she claims to relish the ensuing liaisons — which, she stresses, are all consensual — it quickly becomes apparent that she would rather spend time with her Parisian friends, talking about literature and art, picnicking on the Seine, biking around the emptied-out streets, or delighting in carafes of rosé, plates of gooey chèvre, and cups of chocolat chaud.

As MacNicol chronicles these decadent days, the reader is left to contemplate all that she evades.

To continue reading this review, visit The Literary Review of Canada (no paywall on your first three articles).