On cheese and freedom

Glynnis MacNicol talks about fucking around France, enjoying her friends, and the power of being an untethered woman

In the spring of 2021, Glynnis MacNicol left New York for Paris. It was during a brief moment in the city when vaccines were being rolled out and for the moment, the specter of disease lifted.

When MacNicol got to Paris she planned to balance work with pleasure. But after a year of lockdown, just one small taste of pleasure was enough to send her over the edge. Her work was abandoned, replaced with long lunches with friends, late nights in the park, wine, cheese, and sex.

MacNicol’s book I Am Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is a funny, wry, and exuberant account of her six months in France. It’s rapturous and generous and filled with all the things women are shamed for loving — carbs, cheese, and sex just for pleasure. It’s a radical narrative of a woman simply enjoying herself because she’s alive, because she can, because in this world so miserly with its joys, she’s taking each and every one she finds.

In a recent New York Times op-ed MacNicol explains, “We live in a world whose power structures continue to benefit from women staying in place. In fact, we’re currently experiencing the latest backlash against the meager feminist gains of the past half-century. My story — and those of the other women in similar shoes — shows that there are other, fulfilling ways to live.”

I spoke with MacNicol about the narratives around aging, pleasure, and sex, and how radical it is for women to reject them.

LL: I've never gone and fucked around France yet, but so much of what you were writing about freedom and messiness without apology and cheese was just exactly what I needed to hear. Tell me, when did you know you had a book with this?

GM: I didn't even think the plane was going to take off until literally it was in the sky. I left for France during the summer when the vaccines rolled out and it seemed like the world was opening it up. And then immediately the Delta wave rolled in. When the plane kicked off it felt like that scene in World War Z where all the zombies are chasing it.

And then I landed in Paris, and at first, I tried to get work done. And then very quickly I was like, fuck it. I don't want to do any work. And as a freelancer, I feel like you only plan so far ahead.

I knew I had six months planned financially. So I didn’t work. And then I saw friends I hadn't seen, and of course eating there was so pleasurable. So, I was in a frenzy. It was like I got a little taste of pleasure, and then I just wanted the whole thing. My aunt who was a born-again Christian had this thing she said to me once that has stuck in my head where she was like, that's how the devil gets you, G.

So you just have one little slice of cake and you think it's just a little bit of sin, and then you have another slice, and before you know it, the whole cake's gone. So I was like, I had a little taste of pleasure. Then I had a little bit more, and I was like, not enough. I want the whole thing.

LL: Yeah, you were like, I want the devil to get me.

GM: Exactly. I'm like, give me all the cake. I realized what I was really missing during that time was community. Also, I was getting all these messages on these dating apps — it was so exciting. I wasn’t sure what to do with it — being alone and then having so much company so quickly. I was like, how do I get my clothes off, essentially? But of course, I couldn't keep them on once they came off.

I got back from that trip, and one of the things I really wanted to capture in the book was, sex is great and cheese is great, but they're just some of many pleasurable things. Friendship is also pleasurable and such a priority in my life, and also my bike — and just the ability to be on the move and the freedom to choose pleasure.  

And I knew to feel good about my untetheredness. Culturally, we do not reward women for untethering themselves. We punish them.

We don't have many pleasurable books about women's experience, particularly in middle age, particularly detached from the search for a partner or pregnancy. And I just wanted this pleasurable thing that I experienced to be a book. And also having the understanding that in some way the larger scope of all of history, it was radical. It makes me think of a moment in Lauren Groff’s Matrix where you can see the arc of history shifting toward more progress and then progress ends.

I had this moment of thinking that I need to witness this experience in my own life because this freedom and pleasure felt rare in a way, and maybe between the political backlash to feminism and the rollback of reproductive rights, opportunities like this might not be possible in the future. It feels like we're at a very precarious moment and I thought, I just want to write this all down.

LL: I have been trying to watch more movies. But so many of the narratives that are told about women where we find our freedom or pleasure end in death or suicide or unmitigated rage. And I'm just so fucking tired of middle-aged female narratives being simply that a woman is miserable. She hates her children, she hates her husband. She’s ugly and invisible. And nothing will ever change. Because I feel like my lived experience is the opposite. I’m more free, more desirable, and more independent as I get older.

GM: Most women are more attractive and more desirable as we age because of our confidence and the fact that we learn to detach our self-worth from our physical appearance. No person I have been with has ever been like, gross, could you put your clothes back on, please? Because they're so excited by someone who has confidence and a sexual appetite. Things I did not possess when my breasts were pointing in the same direction.

LL: There is something to the confidence that comes with age and the knowledge to know what is enjoyable and not settling for less. I had a situation recently where I told someone exactly what I needed to experience sexual pleasure and when he refused, I sent him home and he was so flummoxed. Like it never occurred to him that my pleasure was a priority.

GM: A good night's sleep alone is also really enjoyable. See you later. The stories we’ve been told about middle age are so damaging and limiting.

I emerged from Covid at 46, about to turn 47. And this left me with this sense of enormous optimism and excitement and the real belief that everything we're told about age is a lie. And it's not that aging is always easy and perfect or that it isn't difficult or your body is not all over the place. But as a woman, my body has been all over the place for as long as I can remember. Every period is its own fucking opera since I was 14 years old. This isn't the first time things have gone haywire.

We can see the caricatures that are attached to women because I think we're comfortable with women over 60. We really think that there's no sexual viability there, which is a lie. And we're comfortable with certain versions of women in their fertility years because we all think they should be headed to the same idea of romance and children. But free women between 40 and 60 are dangerous. We are actually maybe our most sexually viable at that age, but fertility isn't on the table and subsequently you're pursuing sex purely for pleasure. And I think that’s an uncomfortable idea for America.

I'm constantly being told by women who are a few years older that this is the time when you become invisible. The shopkeeper doesn't address you and the taxi driver ignores you and you won't be noticeable to anyone anymore. And, so far it's been the literal exact opposite coming from men ranging from 25 and up. You can talk about what 25-year-olds are in it for, but I think it's all similar to what I'm in it for — enjoyable sex. And also, this is cynical and probably not entirely true, but in my experience, the maturity arc of men from 25 to 45 is almost a flat line.

My emotional maturity level at 25 is so different than 45. In that time, I was seven different people and I think men are not required to transform in any similar way. 

I get angry that any of this is a surprise to me because I'm like, men are always the ones greenlighting. These stupid stories we see in Hollywood, these dumb superhero movies. And speaking of a satisfying movie, I always bring up An Unmarried Woman starring Jill Clayburgh, which is glorious.

It's set in the late ‘70s in New York. She has a so-called “great marriage.” Her husband comes home and says, I'm having an affair and leaves her and it's so good. I never get tired of it. And the fact it doesn't stream anywhere, even though it's considered a classic, is so telling, and it's one of the few movies that doesn't end with “I fell in love again.”

One of the reasons that Eat, Pray, Love was such a hit is that she falls in love at the end. Obviously, in real life that didn’t stick. But the narratives we tell about free women so often have to end in them falling in love again.

LL: During 2020, I just felt so fragile. I was so alone. I was not near family. I was working three different jobs. No childcare. I was having panic attacks, I was having vertigo. I couldn't get out of bed every morning without passing out because my vertigo was so bad and it was all stress. And I justified it because I was working for my local paper, and that felt noble and necessary. But then they fired me for a stupid political reason. And I was like, wait, I almost killed myself for this, this? And then it was like something inside me fundamentally broke. And I was like, well, then I don't fucking care anymore. I can't spend the rest of my one wild and precious life breaking myself for people or institutions who just want to use my body up and toss me out when I assert agency.

GM: I do think there's something to that too. In this post-Donald Trump world there is a sense of nobody is looking out for us.

LL:  Men are not coming to save us.

GM:  Not one of them, not even the good ones. Literally none of them are coming to save us or are particularly concerned about our wellbeing. And the idea that I should reorganizing my life around their expectations or feelings is a waste of my energy.

I’ve had male editors ask me, do you think that people outside of women who are 45 and single will relate to your work? And I'm like, fuck. First of all, I don't care. You've been reading stories about men for my whole life and enjoying some of them. Did anyone say to William Finnegan about Barbarian Days? Do you think people who weren't born in the ‘60s and haven’t been surfing their whole life will be able to relate to your surfing story?

LL: Also, so many male novelists write the same fucking story that's like, I'm a man in middle age who is falling apart, and then he falls in love with this hot younger woman who will sleep with him and then he’ll learn something important and stare out at the water. And I literally just described every single book. And nobody's ever like, Hey, is that relatable? 

I get so many women asking me at book events, well, what if I don't want to get divorced, but I still want freedom, but my husband won't do anything? And I'm like, I'm so sorry, but why are you working in service of a narrative and a system that does not fucking care about you?

GM: Because they think there is no other option. Being free is terrifying and it's scary. I feel for the women over 60 who email me — there's almost an anger there. And I think I get it because you have been following the rules and you've been rewarded for following them. And then someone comes along and says, actually everything you've structured your life around is meaningless. That is so destabilizing.

LL: To go off that, talk to me about accusations of selfishness.

GM: I had to stop myself in the book from being like, here are the things that did during the pandemic. Here's how I spent my 40s being a caretaker. Here are all the ways I function as a support system, so you know that I'm not a selfish person. But I stopped myself because, fuck it. I am not selfish. But I don’t need to prove that. I think constantly about how every narrative and rule and reward women are offered is mostly a way to get them back inside the house in some way. Even riding bicycles. When bicycles were first introduced, there was a concern that young women shouldn't ride them. The seat might inadvertently give them an orgasm. What's orgasmic is fucking being able to go somewhere by yourself.

The question I got asked the most was how I could eat dinner on my own. And I know you've written about sitting at the bar, and I was always like, how do you not eat dinner on your own? That's how I know my life is a success. I'm having dinner by myself. And any time someone is trying to shame you for your behavior, ask yourself who benefits from the shame that you are feeling. If women stopped participating in capitalism, even just in all the things we buy to make ourselves more so-called attractive, the whole economy would fall apart.

LL:  Yes! We have set up a whole system of goods and products to make women feel less miserable when what would actually solve their problem is freedom.

GM: I mean, if women were allowed to do what they wanted, think of all the power structures that would collapse all of them. So I think that when we talk about selfishness, it is another way to get free labor out of women

LL: I think this might be a trauma-informed question from my book tour, but I want to know what you're going to say when you go out and women say, well, it sounds like a great idea for you, but I couldn't possibly. Like, good for you? But I could never be this free.

GM: I have two thoughts on this. And one is, it is always telling to me that women have this response because, and I think it's a result of six, seven, eight decades of women's magazines where the entire premise is what you should do to be better, more attractive, more worthwhile. And so we have a very difficult time consuming stories about women without taking it as a personal judgment on how we are existing in the world. My story is not a personal judgment on how anyone else lives their life. And that to me feels like a way of condemning or ignoring the stories women tell. 

And my second response to that is, you not wanting to live your life like me is not a barrier for entry into a story.

I can barely boil an egg and I cannot get enough of reading Ruth Reichl. Thank you. And I was obsessed with Little House on the Prairie, as you know, but I am not going to live in a dugout. And again, I mean William Finnegan’s Barbarian Days is my favorite comp because that won the Pulitzer and people were obsessed with it. I'm not going surfing off the coast of Hawaii either then or now, but I'm so grateful that he wrote down that he did because now I know what that was like.

I'm grateful that it was written down because, just by being written down, that life begins to exist as a possibility. And maybe within that possibility you find some version of it that makes you rethink what brings you pleasure in your life. But I hope my book brings the sense that you deserve to enjoy yourself just for enjoyment’s sake, and that if that is not available to you literally in any way, there are larger questions to be asked and not about you as an individual, but about the direction you are going in, the place you're directing your anger at. Because I am not the problem. My enjoyment is not the problem. It's a system that is the problem.

LL:  I loved how you said in your Times piece about writing about this in a time of backlash. I imagine you didn't anticipate writing this in a time of backlash, but it does seem powerful that we are in a time where women have had fewer rights than they did. 

GM: There are plenty of women in all of history who would've killed to have any shred of the agency you and I have and died for it or didn't die for it or died because they didn't have access to birth control or all of these things.

And to operate in the world with this freedom feels like there comes a responsibility to be aware, — not that you're privileged in that sort of annoying sense like, oh, you're so privileged. But the joy and enormous great fortune of being born at a time and a place where there is so much freedom to be had. And then, to decide to not feel shame around it and to say, I'm so lucky to be able to do this. And then do it.

But I also think this freedom and resilience and joy is terrifying to men.

LL:  A lot of the backlash against narratives like yours and mine is like, oh, you're just these bitter old women. But, I'm actually happier and more joyful than I have ever been. I have so much fun all the time. I really do. I love my life. Just last night I was like, I don't want to cook. So, me and my kids went out. We sat on a patio, we played card games, there was a rainbow. I was just so happy to make these choices without someone leaning over my shoulder criticizing and critiquing. It’s also why I don’t read parenting books anymore. Because I’m enjoying myself and messing up, sure. But that freedom to be happy is truly a radical act.

GM:  It does feel that way. And also even just describing having dinner with the kids on a patio, it's like these small moments, which I think traditionally have been diminished as frivolous or meaningless. And the fact we don't necessarily have access to these moments within the structures that we're raised to pursue or value is so telling that once we're outside of it, you're like, I'm fucking having a great time.

It's easy to sell this book being like, and then I took my clothes off five different times, and I did. But  so much to the joy of this book is riding on a dirt road with friends or just having a meal. It's funny, this is a pre-Ozempic moment too, where you're just like, I'm just having a meal. The pleasure of stillness and community. So many of the loneliest people are in marriages, which is why I'm always puzzling over these “get married” articles, and I'm like, who are you talking to?

LL: I say this all the time. The loneliest I have ever been was on the inside of a marriage. Now that I am outside, I am alone often, but I am not lonely in the way I was before.

GM: I have friends who are in good marriages. And I'm grateful for these partners. But I also am an emotional support system for so many of my married friends who are in solid marriages that make me think, oh God, imagine if the only person you had access to is your spouse, you'd want to die. You'd be so angry.

People forget that the end of The Handmaid’s Tale is an epilogue, where it turns out that they're at an academic conference in the future, and they're debating over whether these journals are authentic and representative of how women were living at the time. And there was part of me when I started writing this book, where I thought if we're headed toward a century of darkness, then I would just like to have evidence that it wasn't always like this. And even if it gets shoved into a closet and someone discovers it in an academic conference in about a hundred years, I just want there to be evidence that there was a brief shining moment when we were free.

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Read an excerpt from I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself in Town and Country and in The Guardian.