This wasn’t my original plan for my July book but the one I’d planned to read sounded like even its own author hadn’t enjoyed it so off I went to the Kindle shop where I came across I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol. It’s the tale of a woman in her 40s who’s been confined to a New York apartment by the COVID restrictions who comes to spend a month in Paris in the summer of 2021 to indulge in freedom, cheese and men from a fruit-themed French dating app.
On the surface, it looks like it’s about travel. It’s about moving to Paris! OK, it’s a short-term move, a long holiday, but how many Travel Library books have been about really getting immersed in a country for a long time? Not many. No, it’s really about being a hedonistic writer in a big sparkling city. Sex and the City without the Blahniks. That’s not really my thing. So imagine my surprise when I loved it! I spent weeks afterwards looking for something similar to fill the desire for more. I began to plot how I could do this myself (work Fridays for three months to take a whole month off, only I’d go to Helsinki because I don’t love Paris)
I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself manages to avoid most of the Emily In Paris clichés. The author is a freelance writer so there’s no tangling with French working practices or French bureaucracy – or, really, with French. There are no trips to big tourist traps like the Eiffel Tower or the Arc de Triomphe and certainly no Disneyland Paris. This is the Paris of the actual Parisian – arrondissements most tourists couldn’t find on a map, cafes and restaurants down back streets, getting around by bike-share bike rather than Uber, or even the metro, shopping at Franprix for cheese and bread and even the fashion is local- she lives in a €12 dress from Monoprix. That said, the one stereotype we do get is the usual transatlantic fuss over ground floor vs first floor.
Finding I’ve finally finished my Iceland book, this is exactly what I want to write – a fairly ordinary life of a fairly ordinary person going to ordinary places and doing ordinary things which manages to read like highest glamour and excitement. I do wonder what it could have been like set in Hull or Munich or anywhere that doesn’t have the Paris glitz because I think a lot of it is assumed rather than actually seen. There’s just something about Paris. You only have to say the name to see the Eiffel Tower twinkling against the sunset, the croissants, coffee and pavement cafes, the women in their Parisian chic, the language of love and seduction. Never mind that that’s not what Paris is actually like. And so without featuring the Eiffel Tower or fashion or much French, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself evokes the Parisian atmosphere, which automatically elevates it.
It’s an odd Paris, though. I recognise the quieter suburbs and streets, the ordinary life of an ordinary resident, but it’s so quiet. I know a lot of French people tend to take their holidays in August but I’ve never found it makes any of the tourist areas, let alone Paris, any quieter. Of course, this is the summer of 2021, where everyone’s tentatively poking their heads out of isolation and lockdown but it seems alien that you could basically have the Louvre to yourself. Then again, it’s a huge place and we know that everyone rushes to the Mona Lisa and takes very little interest in anything else. I know I’ve had entire wings of London’s Natural History Museum entirely to myself because I’ve stepped away from the dinosaurs so I suppose it is plausible. It just feels weird to imagine the biggest attraction in Paris deserted.
The thing I wouldn’t have if I moved somewhere to write for a month is the circle of friends, the supporting characters. Glynnis has spent several weeks in Paris in the summer for several years now and has built up her contact list, which means there’s always someone – a handful of someones – to join for a picnic or a trip to a party in the Bois de Boulogne or a weekend away by the beach. I think if you’re going to write something like this, it helps to have other voices, it helps to have people to interact with. It works ok for many kinds of travelogue, especially where the half the point is the psychological aspect of pushing yourself to your limits but when it comes to hedonism in the big city, I think it would be odd to be totally isolated.
Let’s skip quickly over the aspects of dating, because half the reason for being in Paris in the first place is for human contact. A lot of the men Glynnis meets on the French dating app are quite content to spend weeks messaging, if they ever meet in person at all. When she does meet them, it generally stays just about on the PG side (on the page; I say nothing about what actually happens in real life) but the flipside to that is that you never feel like there’s any emotional connection between her and her latest conquest (which sounds like it’s an endless stream of men; it’s not). It’s almost like they’re there to do a job, one which she doesn’t have a great deal of interest in but which must be done. And fair enough, you might not want to go into gory detail about how you adored someone and spent the next six months floating on their memory, or how you loathed them, in a book to be released to be the public but the end results is that all the encounters just feel kind of… mechanical. Box ticked. Baguette, eaten. Seine, seen. Man, encountered. Tick.
Yes, ultimately, I really liked this book. It inspired me to do something similar, either in taking a month out of my life to just live joyfully or to write a book about life. Or maybe a blog. Maybe I’ll get back into 21st Century Spinster, my ever-planned but never-written lifestyle blog. I think maybe you shouldn’t expect anything particularly groundbreaking from I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself but I personally really enjoyed the tale of a woman existing joyfully in Paris for a few weeks.