High Five With Glynnis MacNicol
The author of the memoir No One Tells You This is back with a new memoir about the pursuit of pleasure and five things she's obsessed with right now.
Each month, I ask an author I love to share five recommendations they have for other writers, whatever is the wind beneath their wings when they sit down to write. This month I reached out to author
whose book, I’M MOSTLY HERE TO ENJOY MYSELF, is on sale June 11th — and available for preorder in the meantime. It’s a page-turner of a book about the lies women have been told - and how by taking life into her own hands, in Paris no less, Glynnis found joy, friends, wine and an abundance of cheese.So without further ado I’m handing the metaphorical microphone over to Glynnis.
This insta account, cook_as_you_feel_it run by a French baker has (along with the baby orphaned elephants) been my personal intsta therapy for a while now. I don’t cook. At all. (Though I did once write a book about baking, starring the iconic Ladybird bakery in Brooklyn, which is now being forced to relocate). There is something so extraordinarily satisfying, dare I say, miraculous and hope-filled, about watching rising dough and melting butter.
Difficult Things. Obviously you don’t need me to tell you things on ye olde Planet Earth are not great. My personal way of coping is to try and go deeper in the hopes things will feel less out of control. Lately this desire has been fulfilled by two podcasts and a documentary. I inhaled both About a Boy: The Story of Vladimir Putin, Julia Ioffe’s podcast about Putin and the documentary Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War. Every week I look forward to Unholy: Two Jews on the News (related: someone really needs to profile Yonit Levy).
Ambition Monster. My friend Jenn Romolini has a new book coming out a week before mine. Jenn and I are basically the same age and have had similar career trajectories. And right now we seem to be bookending the two extremes of middle age in our writing. Ambition Monster is her account of how the promise of ambition and success took over her life, and why and how she came out the other side. It’s so well-written, I literally stop and reread graphs for the pleasure of how she puts words and ideas together.
Middlemarch. I once read that Norman Mailer started each day with a chapter of Anna Karenina. I’m not interested in mimicking any part of Mailer’s life (except maybe the top floor home he had in Brooklyn Heights), but I do try to start my day with something similarly long, if less depressing. Literally one paragraph will do the trick; it feels like a tuning fork for the day.
Real Life. Instead of text messages I send voice memos (what my friend Ann Friedman refers to as personalized mini podcasts). Whenever I pitch something these days I ask to do it over the phone. I make dates. I will show up for an envelope opening. Real life is always better.
