Work in Progress with Sophia BushAuthor Glynnis MacNicol is living her dream! Over 40, single, childfree, enjoying her freedom, and living life to the fullest, and she's written a memoir all about it!
The author, journalist, and podcaster joins Sophia to chat about her new book, "I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself," which chronicles her time in Paris in pursuit of pleasure! She reveals what led her to leave her life in New York for Paris, how her experiences challenge societal assumptions about women of a certain age, why she thinks her book is resonating with readers, and the satisfaction of claiming your freedom and finding joy in aging!
"I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman's Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris" is available for purchase now.
Hi, everyone, it's Sophia. Welcome to work in Progress Whip Smarties. Today we are joined by one of my writing crushes. I'm so excited that she's here. I may have to take a deep brother or two before we get into this interview. Today's guest is none other than Glynnis McNichol. She wrote the incredible memoir No One Tells You This about turning forty, and as you know from many of the stories I share, it's pretty fabulous. And her forthcoming book called I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is absolutely unbelievable. The book is about one woman's pursuit of pleasure in Paris. She is determined to take pleasure in everything and everyone that she encounters, most importantly, including her self. The book is joyful, subversive, honestly singular. In it, Glennis really upends all the assumptions that we have about women and age. She says at one point, what no one prepares you for as a woman is for everything to go right, but sometimes it does. I cannot wait to talk to her about her career as a journalist and a writer, and about the books that she has written that I just find to be the most inspiring battle cries for a joyous life. Let's hear Glennis. Hello, Hi, Hi, how are you.
I'm good? Thank you so much for doing this. It's a fun thing.
Well, I'm just so excited that you're here. I Before we dive in, I have to say I was just on a trip. I went to a really inspiring conference I had to go to France for. And then my partner's mentor had her birthday, turning fifty nine, just like the most fabulous, amazing, inspiring woman, and we bopped to like meet her and her family on this once in a lifetime family trip they were taking for her birthday. They were in Greece. I was like, wow, if this is a sign for me of what's to come at fifty nine, Like, sign me up. I'm so into this. And we were sitting around talking and your New York Times article had just had just come out, and I was like, I am interviewing this time that she just posted this up. But it is so amazing, and I like, I literally sat by this beautiful pool, oh you know, benefiting from the success of my older friend's life and reading people quotes from your article.
Oh so good.
Yeah, it was so fun.
I have to say that that article, I mean, going viral the New York Times is its own sort of intense experience. But so I woke up that morning and I thought, well, this is going to be an interesting day. You sort of brace for the comment section or people who go and find your email and write to you. And I have to say I was the most surprising thing about that was, with one exception, all the feedback was positive, Like it was why it was much different than a couple of years ago when the feedback was sort of very predictably angry. And but this I was like, and you know a great deal of it for men too, who are like I see myself in this, And I just think that that is something that more people should who are in charge of storymaking sho maybe take into consideration. Is like the way stuff like that resonates and not as a source of I'm so angry at you, Like it was really interesting.
Well there's something it's both I think very inspiring and very confronting to be mirrored by someone who's chosen to be free. And I'm friends with this and credible non binary artist and they talk a lot about how incredibly overt queer expressions of freedom, yeah, confront people who feel trapped in a binary yeah, and make them say, well, who do you think you are to live this way?
Yeah?
And it's the projection of the self hatred. It's the projection of the way people make themselves feel small.
I also think that if you've spent your I think about this in different scenarios, including the one you're referencing, is that, like, if you've spent your whole life being rewarded for living a certain way, and you've built your self worth on these particular rituals because they were the only ones available to you, and then suddenly the world comes along and is like, actually, all of this is constrictive and meaningless. I'm sympathetic to how destabilizing, not sympathetic to rage that manifests and you know, violence in any way, but I'm sympathetic to that sense of like everything's been destabilized and I don't understand myself in this new way, and that the most immediate reaction is I'm going to be angry at you for making me have to think about the fact that the decisions I have been rewarded for by the entire culture for so long, You're suddenly telling me you're meaningless. Like, I think, it's a lot, that's a lot to deal with.
And yeah, I particularly see that in the way we've seen this backlash with men toward women about you know, quote changing the rules around the way they're allowed to speak to us. Oh, you can't take a joke, and oh you're so serious, Oh yours those sensative and it's like, no, we're just sick of being harassed and touched and killed and yes.
So I imagine for like centuries, women were sick of all of those things if they had no agency to respond to it or not engage with it, and that some of that age is like, oh, I'm choosing not to be here because actually this is awful and I have a better version. And then it's like, what do you mean like that, that sense of that absence of control, I think is rage inducing for a lot of pretty awful people.
Well, and what I don't know if sympathize with is the right word, but what I can see must be difficult is if you because listen, we know that these systems, they're certainly bad for us, as you know women sisgendered women, they're very bad for queer people, and they're actually very bad for cisgendered men too, right, like patriarchy hurts men, And so I bet it is really hard to be like, I've done this thing my whole life. I'm absolutely miserable. I hate my fucking job. And everybody told me that if I made enough money and got old enough, I could fuck a hot twenty five year old, and now you're telling me I can't. And I'm like, ah, I wish that it wasn't that gross, but yeah, it must be a bummer if you've hated your whole life and now you've gotten to a point where the thing you thought would be your reward you don't get to have. Like maybe your reward should be something for you or like a cookie and not a person. But we can talk about that later, you know. I think to your point, there has to be this willingness to inspect, no matter our moral feelings about the feelings or reactions, we have to expect inspect people's feelings and reactions to change, because if we just yell about it, we can't create anything better. And I think, coming totally full circle, that that's why the article that you wrote, and that's why your book I think they're resonating so intensely with people because you are simply modeling personal freedom and joy and say you could just change.
Your life too if you want, or here's one version of what it's like a pleasurable life looks like that. I see a lot of women in my life living, and I don't see it reflected in culture. I think a lot of what motivates my writing is this sense of like being a lifelong reader and being so attracted to these narratives and then reaching a point somewhere around age forty where I sort of disappeared culturally and constantly being made to feel sort of like not invisible in a way, but then seeing around me so many people living similar lives, and then never seeing that reflected in the culture, and that that feels gas lady and enraging and bad storytelling. And I'm like, why are we so confronted with all of this nonsense? It's not serving anyone. So I often think of like I'm observing my own life and just being like, here's another way to be like, actually, none of the stories have served me well, And here's how I'm experiencing it, Because it's like witnessing almost in a way where it's like, these are things that bring women pleasure, these are things that bring me pleasure. I'm not speak I can't speak for an entire gender, obviously, but I'm like, these are things that bring me pleasure. They were not the things that I expected or was told should be pleasurable. And I have access to all of these opportunities I was told were not going to be available to me. And actually I feel more powerful than I've ever felt, and the horizon feels more wide open. And I just feel compelled to tell you about that because no one else is and I see everyone so many other people experiencing this, and it's a little crazy.
Making yes, and I feel the same. And I to have gotten, you know, in my own way. I guess you could say in the patriarchy, or you could just say in like the pursuit of a life. You know, I did everything I was supposed to do. I checked all the boxes, I built the life, I did the thing. And I looked around and I was like, I'm fucking miserable. Yeah, And I don't think this is what it's supposed to be, right, I don't think Sobbing at the kitchen table every night and begging to be talked too, seen or in ltimately considered is like the best and highest use of my time.
Yeah, like what is this? Or how you even want to sign your time? Yeah, it's all but and then you look at I think too, is that you Narratives are so important because narratives impact are like legal structures, right, Like when we prioritize marriage as a financial, legal way to live, you are punished in ways outside of social, socially and culturally for living outside of them. And it's like it's enough to say I don't want to live like this, but I do feel like we are compelled to then say the different ways we're doing it, because how else do you shift? Like the financial infrastructure of America is in so many ways pegged to marriage, which is why all these men, even the progressive ones, are keep writing like the solution to these problems or that women should get married more. That is literally like what Nick Christoff keeps writing, And you're like, I'm pretty sure there are other solutions. It's probably not it, right, this is probably not it, but like there are other ways to be, but you're financially punished for being outside of them. And then you really think about who's providing the I really think capitalism runs on like the labor of women. I'm certainly not the first person to make that observation, but when you really think of these structures that we're all promised or be satisfying, there is a gas lady element to it, because who is benefiting from us participating in it. It's never us. It's never us. It's like the entire economy of the country is benefiting from it. And when you to think of it in those terms, you're like, wait a second, Yeah.
It's so crazy. And then you understand how in the modern era we live in, a Supreme Court justice in the United States could write the terms, quote a domestic supply of infants. Oh my god, when I know we're turning a rule that texts our literal healthcare that make sure we can live. And it's wild because you go, oh, they need us to provide a workforce. They don't actually care about our quality of life understood. And so you know, my girlfriends and I have been talking about this, and I do want to be clear, you know, for anybody at home, because I realized when you start talking about this, how we deserve to have other options. Some people who like their traditional choice of option feel perhaps attacked. That's not it. Like what was very illuminating for me was looking at my life and the boxes I ticked, and then the lives of my friends and their wonderful marriages, and going, oh, one of these is not like the other, Like this is not correct that I see that what I admire in others is not what I have understood. So to be clear, I'm a fan of any that brings you joy, happiness, fulfillment, whether that's moving to Paris in a pandemic, I can't wait to talk about the book, or which, by the way, was my plan in twenty twenty, and then you know, the world shut down.
I was like, what the.
Or you know, marrying your high school sweetheart who's the love of your life and being together for sixty five years, like whatever it is, I want you just to be happy. But I find you know now, I get kind of excited because I've got a bunch of girlfriends that are like, well, should all the friends just start marrying each other? Should we build a commune? Should we like get a ranch and build some cabins, Like it feels so fun to say Oh, if this is the system, we could probably subvert it for us.
RAINA. Cohen just did a great book on Front on rethinking partnership around centralizing it around friendship versus romantic relationships, and the degrees to which that would practically shift in better ways the way we function in the world. I do think it's it's useful to separate, Like I have plenty of so called good marriages. I think the older you get, the more you realize our definition of good marriage is also misleading and that partnership is individual. And I have plenty of friends in satisfying marriages, and it's important to separate that from sort of how marriage is structured within this country. It's the institution of marriage, and think of them as two separate things. And I do think women in particular have a very hard time experiencing the stories of other women as as something someone else is doing and not as a judgment on their own actions. And I really think that that is the result of most of the variety of stories we get about women's lives directed at women come from women's magazines and are rooted in by this it will fix you, there's something wrong with you. Do this thing that this person did and you will be better. And we really still struggle to read anything by any woman, and our immediate reaction is just, oh, well, I can't do that. And there's still a sort of binary between married and not married, and like one is a judgment on the other art when in fact, like we are allied together. I am a support system from many of my married friends and they are a support system for me. And then midnight you feel satisfied in your marriage with your partner, does not negate that the institution of marriage is not you are not benefiting from it necessarily, you know, in practical ways, and being.
Able to separate out that critical thinking I think is so important and can be the thing that saves us from that reactionary judgment. Like I always call it the Clinton cookie syndrome, Like in nineteen ninety two when Hillary Clinton was literally trying to pass universal child healthcare to take care of everyone's children's in America as the first Lady of the United States, and people were like, well, why are you doing that? And she said, well, what am I supposed to do here? Big cookies? Like yeah, I E I have this opportunity to advocate for every mother in America and she got shot on for it, and I was like, oh boy.
I remember that. I mean I think I was seventeen or eighteen when that happened, and I was a Canadian, so I was still in Canada at that point. I remember that news story and actually thinking that Hillary was in the wrong. It's very hard to like interesting, yeah, I think in hindsight and certainly where we are now, it's sometimes hard to emphasize like the degree that that narrative was not that narrative, I know, was like shocking to you know, feminists who were writing in the space, not shocking, but that it was angering. But like as a general cultural thing, I don't remember thinking how dare they? I just remember thinking like, oh, yeah, you know, Hillary is like not likable. That was my teenage response to that, as like as a person who had a teenager would have called him a feminist. So it's really I think about Hillary a lot. I covered the two thousand and eight campaign for Playboy magazine. Funny enough, but she was She's of that generation similar to my mother, who like every decade they had to be a different person, right, Like they were rewarded in each decade for he embodying a different idea of women. And so by the time Hillary reached the place where she's running for president, it sounded like she was a hypocrite or contradicting herself, when in fact, you're just like, no, she's changing at she was changing with the times as best she could. And it's like, that's what makes me, I think, have more empathy to when I hear from women, and it's generally women who are a little older than me, and they're just like, you know, there's I feel that anger, and I think, I don't know, I didn't have to iterate to the degree that you've had, and I wasn't. You know, I recognize the rewards you get. So it's like I do try and come to it with empathy. And also I really I like so many of my married friends are married to men who are good books, and that's great. I benefit from them.
I absolutely love that one of my best friends, my girlfriend Sky, is about to marry our friend Edwin and he's such a great cook. And I'm always like, Hi, Mom, h Dad, I'm coming over exactly exactly, cook for me, make me mistake please.
Right, And I think that too gets lost to a lot of narratives where you sort of see like the single best friend who's like sort of sad and like a little like Aunt Jackie and Roseanne, you know, like a little incompetent, and I'm like, no, I'm fully caught. Like it's a mutually beneficial arrangement, But we don't credit women with competence who've made sort of decisions outside of what is still considered a bit of the normal. Although that is definitely shifting, it feels like it's shifting in both ways simultaneously. It feels like it's shifting for progress and at the same time the trad wife movement is sort of like it's both happening at the same time.
Well, it's like we have you and we have that loser, the kicker for the Chiefs going viral in like the same two weeks. Yeah, I'm saying women have been lied to because they want to have careers and pursue their passion and have a life like and then you know, you're out here going viral on the New York Times talking about how the world told you you would become invisible and you're more visible than ever. And my best girlfriend and I my friend Hillary, we did our first TV show together, and we talk about it so much because when our show started, we were playing sixteen year olds and the women who played our moms were our age now, and they were treated as these very secondary characters, and the focus was all on the kids and who they were having sex with or losing your virginity to, and what the drama was in high school. And we always joke that, you know, for ten years we did like but I love Him on TV, And now I'm going I want to see a show about those momsy. My life is more interesting than ever, more layered than ever. My career is deeper and more exciting. I travel the world as a speaker and an advocate. I am the most myself i've and my friends are the most themselves they've ever been. And my intimacy is the best it's ever been, and my joy is the best it's ever been. And like I thought turning thirty was amazing, I had no idea how great everything was going to get when I turned forty. I had no idea that I would finally take the checklist the world gave me for myself and rip it to pieces and say like what do I want? Yeah, And I'm like, have we just been gaykeeping? How great this is? So I'm so excited that you're out here telling us.
It's so funny thing good. I'm glad I do it's funny too, because I do think like when I look back, I'm like, as a kid in the eighties, I had when I think I mentioned that Nod Times off that it's like I had Murphy Brown and Designing Women, and they were all these incredible shows. And it's like, just when we got to the point that we're talking about right now, it sort of ended and hurls backwards. And it does feel like every generation gets quite to this point and then it disappears and so and then we have to I was was talking to the writer Liz Lens about this the other day, this sense of rage where you're like, I'm not the Like we walk around thinking this idea of like I'm the first. I don't want to be the first of anything. It's very that's lonely and and and I'm and I know better, but it's like the rage of even having the space to wonder if you're the first just speaks to like how we've memory hold all of this progress and it's always on like a weird restart button every twenty five to thirty years, and it's like, yes, have we been gatekeeping this? And you're like yeah, because what happens is we get to this point like designing women for instance, or Murphy Brown like the men to use the you know, sort of parlance of younger people, like the men become minor character energy, right, And I think that the rage we saw from some corners towards Barbie of the treatment of Ken, who, by the way, was you know, got the Oscar nomination and the song and all that other stuff, so nearly did fine, But like the rage against oh we've sidelined Ken, is what happened when culturally we get to this point where it's like, oh, this is fantastic. How come no one told me? And then it's like a restart.
It's like, oh no, no, they're going to amass too much power. Come back into the cave and let them crawl out all over again. And I'm like, what what is this? And by the way, I mean, I know you know this, but I think about this a lot that we know and I mean this is like this stat that has been burned into my brain is probably twelve years old, so it's probably even more now. But like if I snapped my fingers in poof America had full pay equity, just pay equity for men and women the GDP, And again this is a decade old stat so I'm sure it's more would increase by twelve points.
Oh yeah, like everyone would be richer. Yeah, Like it's not even just.
Morally imperative or like, oh, you're such a liberal that you want women to have all the it's like it would be better for you too, sir.
So it's so weird to me.
It's like it's not just a moral thing, it's actually like to the betterment of society, it's to the betterment of the economy. It's like conservatives and liberals should all agree on this.
And yet but it would level a power structure, right, like it would when we look at who's in charge sort of the state of the country is less shocking, but like it would level the power structure in a way that I think is terrifying to the people who hold power. Is the truth, Like what if you had to share the power? And I also think even if we just had like universal being in countries where there's socialized medicine and how that shifts how women are able to behave, how everyone is able to behave is shocking. I mean to the most punishing thing in this country is the absence of health care. In my opinion, I think there's no conversation that can be extricated from that. And who is punished the most from absence of health care. It's, as we know, women, because we are in need of it at a much younger age, way more complicated things. And I don't know if you've reached this point, but I turned fifty at the end of the summer, and in the last two years, if I go to the doctor and I'm like this, I don't know, like is this thing is? What's the source of this thing? Like I can't sleep so well? Or like this this thing is hurting, and the doctor will be like it might just be your age, like maybe it's paramenopause, And I'm like, how do you not know the answer to a symptom like as an experience than half of the population for all of time has gone through and it's really just like this nebulous like well mine, I'm thinking like oh my god.
Yeah, And now for our sponsors, well and This is what's really interesting, right to me, is when you start to pull on the thread, you realize how long it is, You realize it's all connected, you know, subjucation, economic restriction, healthcare, all of it. And I'm sure there's people that are like, oh my god, does everything have to be so political? Well, yes, because everything is political. Everything is political. The politics is it's personal, it's how we live, it's where we live, it's the structures we live in. And if you'd like things to change, you should elect people who don't hate women.
Also, I really think the people who are like, why does everything have to be so political are never the people who are suffering from the politics of the situation?
Yeah, or they don't know they are yet.
Yes, exactly precisely. But you're just and I look at them and I'm like, you don't It doesn't have to be political for you because you either, as you say, don't know that you're suffering, or you're not suffering as much as everyone else. It's sorry to interrupt. I'm always when people say that, I'm like, that's just a sign to me that you are living in a different world.
You're either privileged or not awake yet. And either way, good luck to you. I like I am yes, yes, yes, I feel like I'm your personal like cheering section here. What fascinates me about this? And I do feel like you and I could talk you know, policy system, global structures all day, which I love. I can't wait to someday have a meal with you.
It was just like this kind of st to be greater over like some of Martinez, I.
Know, you need like a glass of wine and a nice bola pasta. But the thing that amazes me about this, and like one of the things that I love about really smart women is that even us talking about how we'd love to be having this conversation over a meal is because there's actually pleasure in knowledge, and the root of this, even though these systems can feel overwhelming, the root of it is to know, to grow, to change, which to me is all rooted in pleasure. And your whole project is pleasure. The article is about realizing you still have it and that you have more of it than ever. The book you know, which I'm sitting here, I'm like so excited. I'm like the book it always makes me feel so cool. It's full of dog ears and notes like.
Oh, that's nice to hear. Thank you.
I want to know how from this place you know you're in rewind a few years. You know, you're in your mid forties, you're living in New York, everything shuts down, and then you say, get I'm going to Paris, Like, can you walk us all through? I mean, I guess, I guess for our listeners, maybe give them a little overview of your work, because as you said, you know, you're you're covering and writing, and you publish books and you you write articles, and then I want to talk about, like how we got to this, we got to the naked cover because I know someone's at home listening being like Sophyeah, I know you've read everything.
This person's ever written, but I haven't.
Tell me more about her. So I should have done that twenty nine minutes ago.
But here we are, Yeah, exactly. I do find my conversations these days. It's like we immediately are like not, I know, I know, I know, it's a lot. It is an intense time to be in this on earth, I guess, But in this contra I am a writer and Hawka and I did a big podcast, but I've been a writer and a journalist for I guess twenty years now. I started out in politics and sort of moved to culture and then did a memoir about turning forty and to write in a variety of things on like New York City or culture. At this point you're like, you take the assignment. And I did a big podcast for iHeart the last two years on sort of reckoning with Little House in the Prairie and Loura Engels Wilder, which I was obsessed with as a kid, and we got to go on a road trip, which is unusual and fantastic. So when lockdown happened in March twenty twenty, I live in this where I'm talking to you from tiny studio apartment in Manhattan, and the whole city vacated more or less, but I was alone in this apartment for in this I was alone. Like it was a very intense period of solitariness for like a little over a year. You know, New York was very as La was too restrictive. We really went into a strict lockdown. It was intense. So and I always say during that time, all of us sort of got the most extreme version of our life choices, Like friends of mine who were married with kids, were like, I wouldn't sign up to be this married and this much time with my children, And I was like, wow, I am not like when I said I'm happy, Like by myself, I was not like solitary confinement for sixteen months. So it was, as it was for everyone, really intense. But I really the isolation of it and the lack of you know, just as we said, this would be more fun if we're in person, Like the lack of physical touch, the lack of being responded to by another person or even smelling another person, or just like that sense of community was overwhelming, and it was really overwhelming. And by the end, I'm not even sure I recognized how overwhelming it was because we all had sort of been there for such a long time, and right after the vaccines rolled out in sort of the spring early summer of twenty twenty one, there was that brief period of time time where everyone was like, and it's over and we can like emerge from our houses and we can have fun again this summer. And then sort of the delta variant rolled in and everybody was like boiled again. But in that brief window, I had spent summers past in Paris. I had a friend group there and I had access to an apartment to my email to the owner of the apartment, and I just said, like random question, just on a whim, is do you want could I take this for August? Like do you want to leave? And he said I think it could work. So I bought a plane ticket in May, thinking like, who's to say, what's going to happen in the next seven weeks, like you just I was just like any We've been living in a shifting world, so I'm just going to do it. And I got on the plane at the it was July thirty first, and just to sort of Delta was rolling in and the plane took off and I was like, Okay, here we go and I bye, exactly like I don't know what's going to happen. But at that point I was like I can't. I can't do more of this, Like the risk of leaving was outweighed by the risk of even more time alone and sort of what it was doing to my mental state. So I landed in Paris. My friends were there. Paris was empty because it was empty of tourists, and it was also August, so many Parisians go the way for the month of August, and I was not that empty because I like proceeded to just hurl myself into like every pleasurable experience I could find. I was like so much food, so much I mean wine and cheese, and just so just so happy to be with my friends and like just like not like wanting to like it could not get enough of like hugs or being touched or being together. And then you know, so much sex too, and so much like how quickly can I get my clothes off? And I think you don't think. I mean, it was amazing, But those five weeks there was not like the rational intellectual part of my brain had just shut off completely and I was just like I wasn't thinking like I'm shocked all of this is available to me necessarily. I was just thinking like more, more, more and more, and it was really, I mean, it was pleasurable. Uh it shifted. That was sort of my doorway into so called middle age. I was forty six turning forty seven that summer, and so this is sort of how I entered these years, being like, oh my god, everything I've been told about age is a lie, Like I keep these twenty five year olds just can't seem to get enough of me. And I was not prepared for all of this, like youthfulness, and so just the small moments that I'm not sure get it as much weight in narratives as they deserve. Which is the pure joy of sitting around a table with people who know you and love you, and the joy of just like the sensation of good food. And this was written before sort of the ozembic era was upon us, which is I think shifted our conversations around food to some degree, and like the joy of just like biking and movement and all of these small things. And it was really I had craved during the pandemic. I had friends, not just friends, like people on Twitter who were like, I'm going to take this opportunity to read Tolstoi and were in peace, and I was like, I'm not. I don't want to read any I don't want to read Russian literature. I want to read about people having a good time. And when I got back, I was like, there's no good stories. As a person who is sort of a memoist by nature, I was like, there's no good stories about women enjoying themselves that aren't tied to pursuit of partnership or pursuit of parenthood. Even though they exist in real life, they don't. They do not exist culturally. And I was rereading my JOURNALM been kept journals since I was a kid, rereading my journals a few months later, and I was really enjoying rereading my own journals, and I thought, oh, and I had just read Deborah Levy's The Cost of Living? Have you read that?
I'm actually halfway through it.
Oh, I love. I mean, I think, like, yeah, all three of her Living out of Our are incredible, but that's my favorite. And then Annie or No had not won the No Bell yet, but I was familiar with her and even Rachel Cusk, and just like this sense of like a smaller book with a sort of maybe not a narrative arc we recognize. And I said to my agent, I think I want to do this. Well. I really wanted to capture just I wanted to capture that experience because I feel like, as you say in Beauty and Pleasure is it's it's radical and transformative on a much larger scale. And I think that it's transformative in ways that we generally only connect to protest or rage and actually it is as transformative and as powerful, and evidence to that is how we attach frivolity to women's enjoyment, or how we try and diminish it as selfish. It's actually extraordinarily I mean, as you like, powerful, And so my goal with this book was really just to be like, this is what pleasure looks like for me at an age when I was promised that I would have very little access to it, and this is how powerful it allows me to feel. And also I recognize that sort of on the scope of human history, the rarity and fortune of being able to access this and have this agency is sort of a miracle. And the current state of the world suggests that it might be a temporary one, although I'm not a pessimist, so I mean, I think it should go either way.
And now a word from our sponsors that I really enjoy and I think you will too, But I think the current state of the world speaks to perhaps the better way to phrase it is offers proof of what you're saying. Yes, we have more agency than ever, and they are trying harder than ever to legislate it away. They are so terrified of our power, of our fiscal power, of our political power, of our enjoyment, of our choices, and I I take the threat seriously, but I also take great pleasure in knowing that that's true, in knowing how afraid of us they are. And I think if our pleasure and power could be embraced, I think the world could change. And I think it's why so many people resonate with your work, because you are saying something. Yes, it's unique to you, but you are saying something we understand to be universally true as a concept. And I think it rattles people when they realize that something in them says, oh, this is true for me too. I might not be moving to Paris as a woman at four forty six, mid pandemic, and you know, hooking up with hot twenty six year old Parisian guys. But there's something about this claiming your worst freedom and joy that I understand. Did you know when you left that you were on this journey to pursue radical enjoyment or did you figure it out in real time as it was happening.
I think it was. I think it was after. Actually, I think when I left it was an act of like a combination of desperation and sort of frenzy of just like I really was just like get on the plane. I was not. I think it's sometimes hard to remember, maybe not for everyone, but like the pandemic, if I hadn't written it down, it's almost like when you experienced grief, like if you don't it rewires your brain in a way. That's if you don't write down what's going on in your brain at the moment, you don't remember it and it's very hard to conjure it up again. But by that in the pandemic, this idea of looking ahead felt like our brains had been trained out of like looking ahead for you know, the five year Plan or whatever it was. And so it wasn't a sense of like, oh, I'm gonna it was. I was literally like the tickets here, the plane is leaving, I'm getting on the plane. I don't know what's gonna happen to me when I get off the plane. It could be Paris shuts down, it could be I have to come home, it could be that I'm trapped there. I sort of was just like I don't know, and I don't have the capacity to think about it. And then when I was there, it sort of was. It was like I thought just the act of movement and going there and seeing my friends would just be more satisfying than I could possibly conceive of, and it was. And then on day two I was like, and now I want more of this. So every day it was just until it like this ball was rolling and it was just I moved into this sort of I mean, I guess the Internet phrase for it is abundance mindset, and the most basic way, I was just literally like, oh my god, I can have everything. I was just like there was a day where I was like, wait, literally so far, it's just it's like that Leonard line from Leonard Cohen song, like why not ask for more? I was just like, why not this for more? So far I keep getting more? And so it was literally just in like a kid, like like a deluge, and I just wanted more and more and more. And so when I finally came home came home, the world had then sort of remember, we sort of locked down again for the following months, but I was very much on a high from it and very much it shifted my way of thinking about things. And then as it began to sort of as I began to look back at my journals. I began to sort of have a better understanding of my own actions and the significance of them. At the there's a moan in the book where the middle time, I'm walking with a procession across Paris and there's like a there's no one else in the city. But it was a Catholic holiday, and so there was a procession of and then it was a day that Kabul fell and there was terrible news, and I thought, my God, like I'm sandwiched between these two versions of being a woman right now that are so punishing, and here I am walking alongside this procession and like, I'm experiencing something fundamentally different that's so new and rare. And that's sort of when I started rearranging my thinking around. This was not just like a frenzied how quickly can I take my clothes off, which it was, It was also the significance of being able to do that and against the backdrop of what was happening in the world. But I really I didn't really start thinking about I didn't really sort of have a grasp on things until a little bit later. And when I say a little bit later, I mean like six weeks, so it's not. But I think the processing of that I was so in the moment in a way we like to talk about, Oh, it's so great to be in the moment. I really was so in the moment, and part of that my ability to be so was really just desperation that had preceded my arriving.
Yeah, yeah, I understand that. I mean it sounds like you were you know when when researchers talk about how after an animal experiences trauma, it shakes, and how we don't have that so we store all this trauma anxiety in our body, like it sounds like you went to Paris to shake it, you know.
Literally, yes, for sure, without even realizing to feel like truly, I look at my journals or I think of my thinking, and I think, I just this was not a cognitive thought of I'm not okay. It was really like the door opened I ran through it. Yes, you know, like that sense of I'm and I was so in action. It was like a like a figure in action. Yes, and I just ran. And I also, I think it's hard to, you know, disentangle this whole conversation from the fact I've been a writer for a very long time, and my way of understanding the world is through that. That's why I have journal all the time, like I put it on the page. So it was me sort of coming back from this and trying to understand just a total joy of this experience was how I started to sort of work through it as as something I just wanted people to know as possible.
Yeah, I love that.
That I didn't know that I'm out in like as you say, when you're like, oh, this, you know that sort of the rage of discovering, like why didn't I know all these other people were doing it? I just felt like I'm angry that this is not a story that we all get to have, Like when you say, like this has been gatekeeper, like the gatekeeper on this, I'm like, it does feel like that where you're like, I'm so angry that I didn't know this was available to me. Who how dare you keep this information from me? Like this is not like a specific thing that only I tapped into. This is like yeah, and not in exact scenarios, but just generally when you talk to women over the age of forty, so many women are like, God, I'm just having the best time the best to the best time. Yeah, you know, which isn't to say our lives are not complicated or with challenges, or with grief or all the other things. But like the best time and the fact that's a surprise sometimes it makes me angry.
It does for me too, and especially because you know, if I learned anything last summer, you know, going through me, me and a group of women in my life all got divorced at the same time. And what I began to understand about how courage is deeply contagious for us.
That's a great phrase of youse that that's a wonderful that's a wonderful line.
I'm working on an essay about it.
Yeah, courage is contagious is both a wonderful dead line and and something that you could put on it.
It's wonderful, and it for me, I realized that there is there, really is, and has been generationally this idolization of female martyrdom, sacrifice everything. She's so selfless. Oh so she doesn't exist? Like what does that mean? Yeah, we don't talk about how men are selfless. We talk about how they're heroic or strong, or good dads or good businessmen or whatever. And you know, I like Glennon writes about it and untamed, And when I really started to pull it that thread, like why are women expected to murder ourselves? It took me so long to stop turning my back on myself to make sure other people were happy, and I don't know, like I know that. I got to a point where I was like, well, if I do this for one more day, I'm going to die and that's not an option. So I'm going to kick the door open and then I'm going to run through it. And my best friend was doing it, and I think I was so inspired because I was like, well, if she can do it with a two and a half year old, I can do it with no kids, you know. And then other friends were going through it, some with kids, some without. And what I began to realize was the more we were honest about how like this can't be all that it is, the more we also all got honest about like, oh, I just really hit the point where if I did it for one more day, I think I would have died. And I was like, is this what we've been cultured to become? Women who'd rather be dead than live in our houses? Like this? What are we doing. And so when you talk about how you're frustrated that these examples haven't been set your courage is contagious. You're saying there is another way. And by the way, again, it's not to say being partnered as bad or being married is bad, Like I actually think it's amazing, as long as you're not doing it to check a box. You know, even subconsciously, do you have freedom and pleasure in your life or not? And if you have to pretzel yourself into a smaller version of yourself so you're more palatable for someone else, I don't think you do. And so it excites me when you talk about this, because, yeah, I'm sitting here going same, I'm having this experience. No one told me how great it would be. My best friend that I came up on a TV show with that we started at twenty one. We are forty one, and we're like, what the We are cuter, hogher, having better sex, smarter, funnier, like everything about us is better than it was when we were twenty one. Nobody told us, Yeah, Like I want more Murphy Browns, I want more designing women, I want more of us doing whatever. The twenty twenty four version of Sex and the City in Paris is like.
Let's go yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean even the fact that we so reference Sex in the City because we have nothing else do we have nothing else? Like, it's again so like people will be like eight prey it. I'm like, both of these are fine comparisons, and they were wonderful in their own right, but they're both twenty five years old, and the fact that we're still returning to them, to me again is evidence of the absence of like any storytellings to suggest to us that things might be. And even the new Sex and the City is still like, you know, a little problematic in ways, but it's just like it's like we're still referencing these old examples because we haven't been like no one has sort of opened the door to new examples. And then I mean, we know who holds those you know, who runs the doors? I think is yeah, but it is it's so much more. I feel so much more powerful. That's the thing too, I feel really powerful. Maybe that's the terrifying thing to some people too. It's like I'm not only am I just like, you know, I'm more And it's funny to be like I'm more attractive because I'm like the by the metrics we were raised with. Nothing looks the way it did when I was twenty five, but like I am ten times more attractive. Everything is more enjoyable, smarter, I'm a better friend. Like the sex is the better. Of course, the sex is better. I don't know what twenty five having great sex, but like that feels like a given. But I was just like, it's like, as you say, it shouldn't be. It shouldn't be the surprising. It shouldn't be the surprising to all of us.
Yes, but you know you said something in your book and it really resonated with me. I was having a conversation with one of my best friends around you know, Pride. The really amazing thing for me was like, if you give yourself permission to keep growing and be curious, the older you get, the closer you get to yourself, and the more myself I am, the better friend I can be, the more I can support my friends in becoming more themselves. And then I read this bit in your book, and I hate to be like the person who reads you to yourself, but I'm going to because if you people at home need to hear it. But on page eighty eight in the book, you said something about building quality friendships and later in life seems to fascinate, which has always puzzled me. The older I get, the better I know myself, the less distance I must travel to figure out whether to include someone in my life. The closer I am to me, the closer I am to other people.
Yeah, and I was like, that's it. Yeah, Yeah, I do think, like it's fun to talk about the sex and the cheese, but like, the friendships are my friendships are the most fundamental source of pleasure I have, and they are fundamental as this book. And I do find sometimes that people who've been in long term relationships or have kept their same friend groups since college. Because of this, I'll say, how do you make friends in later life? And I just think, oh my god, how do you not make friends in later life? Like I just feel like the hurdle is so much lower for this exact reason.
Yes, because you're.
Like, I don't have to you. First of all, you recognize you recognize who's not a friend so quickly that you don't find yourself in the situation. You could sometimes find your or I would sometimes find myself in my twenties, which is like your year into a friendship and you're like, why doesn't this feel good? Like what if I Whereas now at this age, I'm sort of like, that's a problem coming my way, this will not go any further. But contrast to that, and much more powerfully and importantly, is like I immediately have intimacy, emotional intimacy with people because I have it with myself right like I don't I know myself all the way through right now? And when you when that, when you, I mean hopefully and probably I think I do. And then ten years from now, you know, we'll have another conversation, I'll be like, oh, I thought that I had this at age. For you, let me tell you what it's like. It's sixty my friends. But it's like when you have it with yourself, it sort of comes with a fearlessness where you're like that sense of oh, will they find this out about me? Or I feel insecure just disappears so entirely that you're like, yeah, I don't. And when you talk about or not you in particular, but when we talk about sort of like younger men being attracted to older women, that's at the core of it. It is the it's not just younger men, it's younger women. It's like attracted to the sense of solidary with self. Yes, And you can be told that in your twenties and it doesn't resonate because there's nothing in the culture to suggest to you that being comfortable with yourself is actually the way to be rewarded. But in real life it is just so great.
It's so cool. And now a word from our wonderful sponsors. Can I ask a question, because here's boring. I think we are the real love story, like women and our friendships and our intergenerational friendships, and the way we advocate for each other, the way we show up is activists, all of it. Yeah, And you know you've mentioned and I would imagine so many people do want to focus on like the sex and the stories and the French dating apps and whatever. That's all in the book. But is it As a woman as bold as you are, do you ever do you ever have a moment where you go, like before you share some of that before, Because even earlier, when I was rattling off all the things, I feel like nobody told me about how amazing my forties were going to be. I was like, you know, I'm having the best sex of my life. And then I was like, oh my god, I can't believe I just said that out loud. And then I was like, I'm fucking forty one years old, Like, yeah, am I supposed to be ashamed of that? I don't think so. No, But I'm even now I'm like, I'm a little anxious saying it to you. And so from this from your vantage point, are you like, oh, I get nervous and I just have to do it? Or did you at forty six did you light the nervousness on fire? Like what do I have to look forward to?
I think you get more. I mean I start conversations about paramenopause with complete strangers at this point. I'm like, so's your body doing this? Because I'm always like on a search for more information and like there's so little of it. But in terms of sex, I quite at this point. And to be clear, I make a living off of writing about myself. But I literally start conversations about this with almost anyone like and if I sense it, they're uncomfortable with it. It's not sort of like in an exhibitionist way. I'm not like, but if the conversation goes that way. I'm very frank about it because it doesn't. I'm like, I don't. I don't feel embarrassed about it. I will say, though, like when I started writing this book, I was in that first draft. You're like alone in a room by yourself, and I thought, oh my god, these sex scenes, Well, I know I just have to write them out now. But they don't have to go in the book, right, Like I could just write it. There's no nobody has to see this. I can just write it out and I do. It's not a live reading on that right, I'm not like sort of improvising it. But from that point to this point, what happens is like the right part of you starts to take over, hopefully, and you start seeing the whole story of a piece, and you want it to be the best version of the story possible. And the more revisions it goes through, and the more eyes that are on it between your editor and other readers, it's not like I feel distance from the story, but I begin to see it sort of a little outside of it. But I will say I did. I recorded the audiobook for this, and I went into the studio thinking, well, this is going to be interesting to read this. I really, I said to the director was a woman. She was delightful. I mean, she was amazing, and we both sort of laughed her way through the beginning of it. When we got to the sex scenes, I was like, oh, this is fantastic. I want to be back in this Like this, I was like, I was enjoying my own pleasure in a very very amusing way. And then I got it and I was like, you know, I could have put in one or more two details that were probably good to like. I actually had that moment of like, no, because sucks should be enjoyable, like sex should be pleasurable, and I and I want people to enjoy sex. Everyone, like I wanted to be a pleasurable experience, and I just I'm not like a sex therapist or like sex positive, but it was just like, oh, I just want you to know that I was having like what this good time looked like, and also like sometimes it was less enjoyable or sometimes the enjoyable part wasn't actually the actual sex. It was you know that it was available to me when I wanted. It's like there was all these different ways of approaching it, but no, So at this point I think I've overcome the hurdle that wouldn't have been true ten years ago. But in promoting a book where there's a bear bum on the cover, I think I had to just sort.
Of had to figure it out.
Muscle it through, and just be like I wrote it, I did it here.
I am here, I am Yeah. So interesting that you can say ten years ago you might not have been able to be so present in your story, and you are. Because you've also talked about how you turn fifty at the end of the summer. Yeah, so you can look back at forty and then you're also looking forward at fifty. What what are you excited about? What are you looking forward to in the next decade now that you know how amazing your forties were? Like, what do you think is coming for you at fifty?
Yeah, it's very I may have set this in the off ed and the reason I say might have because I think I feel like I'm writing so many things right now sometimes, but I think feeling that's good against a backdrop of so much darkness essentially is a strange sort of thing to navigate. So I I in terms of me individually, I'm only excited to see how much better my writing gets, how much smarter my brain gets. Like what else I'm like, what else is going to be available to me that I'm not prepared for? Like I am approaching it with like sort of enormous sense of optimism and at the same time an awareness of like really, I'm like, like, what's the image I'm looking more, almost like when you see a pig in med like just literally like leaning into it as far and immediately as possible, with the sense of not just it will be available in the world, but like your health and fifty the different you know, like it starts to become you start to have friends, and you know, both of my parents died in my forties, and that was a lot of caretaking. Like there's a lot of sort of an awareness of the mortality of your body. If as I have, you've generally experienced good health till the age of fifty, there's this sense of like, oh, mortality is present, and like it seeps it, it casts a different light on it. But I just feel powerful and like excited, and and this sense of like just what I said, like what else don't we know about? Like what else might becoming my way that could be like so much fun or so great or like that I'm not prepared to experience. And then counterbalancing that with I do think a sense of responsibility of we are not in the best moment, and how do I leverage both the platform but more almost like my individual sense of power in ways that are useful in yeah, holding a like I always think your job is like if you get through the doors, you got to hold that door. Figure out a way to keep that door propped open for everyone coming behind. And so what does that look like in the current state of world. I'm not sure I have the answer, but that's sort of where my head is at.
I love that, I really think, especially for those of us who love to write, love journalism or train journalists. I think in times like this being sort of more embodied and happier than ever for me, at least, like you said, with this backdrop of things being so tense and traumatic and us being on the precipice of a lot of really bad I go, Okay, if my capacity for the good has increased so much, I have to I have to hold myself accountable to have as much capacity for what isn't and and show up with my critical thinking and my linguistic ability and my passion for us and figure out how to continue to hold both like, ye, it's part of it's part of the job.
I think like it is part of the job. And I think something like that, like there is resilience and joy, right, joy gives us resilience. The idea that suffering people who are suffering in various scenarios do not simultaneously experienced joy is not true to the human condition, and so finding joy is destabilizing to power structures just as much as anything else. And it also is when you say courage is contagious, like there is a strength in joy and pleasure.
That and it's the joy we're defending.
Yes, yeah, it's not.
We're not trying to get to an absence of suffering. We're trying to get to joy for everyone.
Yeah, yeah, I mean yes, yeah, I think a little less suffering. Yes, I mean it's.
I mean, yes, of course we will.
Of course. And it's like, you can't fix the world either, And it's like, what is that in your small way that you are capable of shifting and what strength can you not just partaken but in part, Like what is the strength you can impart. And yeah, then also the sense of responsibility that comes with like we are people in the world. And I really tried to There was a knee jerk reaction when I was writing a book where I kept wanting to be like, here are all the things that I do that I want you to know about so that you know I deserve this pleasure. And I made myself take all of them out. I was like, I just a deserve pleasure for pleasure's sake. I'm not in here to justify what I'm doing. I'm telling you other stuff. But that doesn't mean that we are not all obligated by being present on the earth, to being responsible to our communities, whatever those communities happen to look like, small or large.
Yeah, I love that. Does that does figuring out how to hold space for yourself and the world? Does that maybe feel like you're work in progress right now or a little bit?
Yeah, I think it's part of this is like I've sort of sometimes remind myself on like you writing this all down is part of this product, like just because I mean, it's so funny how we internalize all this, but it's sort of honestly witnessing these things so that we have this like evidence of possibility. And then also I think, particularly as like a white woman of some privilege, it's I always think that your responsibility is in every room you're in to ask who's not in the room and why they're not there like it. That can be in a little small room or a much larger room. But just moving through the world with awareness is a very basic way to operate that I try to, you know, hold to myself too at the same time. So, I mean, I'm a writer and my writing is observational, and so where do I direct that talent next? And the most useful way, I guess is the question when I get to the other side of this at the end of the summer. Yeah, I love that.
Yeah, where And I love the ownership that comes in that there's actually a claiming of pleasure in the language you chose. Where do I direct this talent?
Yeah?
For you to own your worth and merit and self and want to give of it is that's like a pretty cool both right there. No, we're not.
Well. I'm glad because I feel like at this point, hopefully you know what you're good at and having and there's a difference between modesty and sort of self recrimination or limiting and can be you know, I know, I know where my strengths lie. It's like, how do I put them to use for all of us?
I love it. Yeah, thank you so so much for coming to two more hours. Thank you.
This was delightful. I'm so grateful for your time. Thank you.
