A Memoir of Hot Sex, Hot Chocolate and Freedom — Not in That Order

I’M MOSTLY HERE TO ENJOY MYSELF: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris, by Glynnis MacNicol

In March of 2021, after a full year at home with my husband and children, I began buying dresses. I don’t mean shapeless caftans or comfy “nap dresses.” I mean dresses with a capital “D”: tulle ball gowns and fitted sequined sheaths and flowing chiffon confections. Beautiful and useless, they represented a portal to another world, another life, in which I traversed New York, meeting friends at glittering parties.

Did I long for glamour in a sweatpants-clad world? Yes. But mostly I wanted exactly what Glynnis MacNicol seeks in her absorbing new memoir, “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself” — fun.

While I remained tethered to home and family, MacNicol bought a ticket to Paris. The book alights with her in August 2021, shortly before her 47th birthday, as she trades the Manhattan studio — in which she’d been cooped up alone for 16 months — for a Parisian walk-up, dreamily situated near the Louvre and Notre-Dame.

But the city’s draw, for MacNicol, lies less in museums and cathedrals than in the circle of friends she’s acquired on prior visits, all women, all expats, all alone by choice. With them, she shares “a common language of not being married and not having children.” In this group, she feels an enormous relief to not have to “translate” her life or present herself as “reporting from a foreign country, editing my story accordingly.”

At the first of many wine-fueled dinners, discussion of a Tinder-style French dating app — bearing the hilariously absurd name Fruitz — sparks something inside MacNicol. She immediately sets up an account and begins fielding an onslaught of messages from men (“my phone has turned into a mobile Penthouse Letters”). She realizes that she’s not just starved for companionship, but “consumed with the desire for touch.”