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.”

And so begins an exploration both psychological and physical, as she puts her North American-style fears and mores aside, embarking on a series of one-off sexual encounters purely for the purpose of pleasure. In the process, she becomes aware of her pre-Paris detachment from her own wants and desires.

Steamy as it may be, MacNicol’s sexual odyssey serves as a smoke screen — at times entertaining, at others oddly tedious, at yet others nerve-racking (is she really going to let a total stranger into her apartment?) — for the larger questions that consume her.

How does a woman detach herself from the Western cult of productivity? And can she, thus detached, simply experience pleasure and beauty? Can a woman who has chosen a life outside of still-dominant gender norms avoid internalizing societal scorn?

MacNicol explored these same questions in her searching, intimate debut, “No One Tells You This,” which chronicled the tumultuous year following her 40th birthday, when her beloved mother heartbreakingly succumbed to Parkinson’s.

In this follow-up, she employs a harder, cooler tone and style, scaffolded with a tinge of defensiveness, as if anticipating the judgment of prudish readers who clutch pearls to their necks as they gape in horror at her flouting of convention. In her 40s, she explains, she has grown accustomed to disdain from “a certain woman.”

What “really irks this woman,” she writes, “is that I appear to be enjoying myself. I have veered off the narrow path laid out for women” and, worse, “it turns out I’m fine.” Or, as her Paris friend Nina puts it, “We’re an attack on the value system of certain people.”

Perhaps. But MacNicol’s prickly stance keeps the reader at arm’s length, at times leading to fatigue with her endless descriptions of meals — so much rosé and chocolat chaud — and bike rides around the city.

MacNicol is undoubtedly an incisive cultural critic, with a clear and singular take on our social-media-dominated era, and it’s a pleasure to accompany her on her considerations of thorny social issues. But in “I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself,” her distrust of — and disdain for — the reader often threatens to undermine her sharp observations and analyses, not to mention narrative momentum.

Still, the force of MacNicol’s elegant prose presides, alongside her uncompromising intellect. The novelistic approach to scene and character that animated her first book is largely a delight, the literary equivalent of a long catch-up with a brilliant friend. And if that’s not fun, I don’t know what is.

I’M MOSTLY HERE TO ENJOY MYSELF: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris | By Glynnis MacNicol | Penguin Life | 278 pp. | $30