New Adventures Beyond 45

Miranda July and Glynnis MacNicol's Narratives of Expanding Lives

Hello readers. Yes, it’s already July and you haven’t yet seen the last of The Booktender’s June reading list. Vacation will do that. When it came to posting:

Garbo’s famous excuse for ignoring a swanky dinner invitation came back on my radar through I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself: One Woman’s Pursuit of Pleasure in Paris, Glynnis MacNicol’s memoir of her post-COVID hot middle-aged summer. It read as nicely as I’d planned, on a hammock strung between gorgeous pines. It also combined well with an unplanned addition to my vacation pile. Miranda July’s the buzzy new work of fiction All Fours also starts out with a middle-aged woman taking a vacation alone. Petya K. Grady’s review gave me serious FOMO, so I picked it up spontaneously at the airport.

Women Vacationing Alone

If you enjoy moments of unexpected literary serendipity, get this: my planned reading vacation unexpectedly started with a few days solita thanks to an emergent domestic/pet situation. My husband knows a summer escape is a basic requirement of my existence, so he encouraged me to go on ahead while he stayed behind to deal with things. What a guy!

My family caught up with me later in the week. But from Wednesday to Friday it was just me and my books, and the mirror asking me “well, what are you gonna do to expand in the second half of your life, hmmmm??”

My favorite parts of this New Yorker’s memoir of her five-week post-COVID vaccine summer emergence in Paris got into other famously unattached women’s connections with each other and to those cities: Greta Garbo, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Lee Miller, and Edith Wharton. Through their examples, MacNicol explores what it means to approach the second half of life with excitement, as a woman who likes herself, who feels pretty good about her body and sexuality and her friendships and maybe even her career, independent of any goals related to marriage or motherhood. It may seem surprising this sounds radical in 2024, but MacNicol shows how few shared narratives we have of happy women whose life arc has not been defined primarily by a downward spiral after 40, or by their relationships to men and children.

The book did get off to a slow start for me. The faire la queue beaucracy of Chapter 5 “Pass Sanitaire” countered the book’s descriptions of Paris (the light! the cafes! the beauty!) and offered little of the pleasure promised by the title. I set it aside for awhile.

Although it fell a bit short of vacation read hall of fame status, I’m glad I read I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself. I also loved the sections in which MacNicol spends time with a close group of women who are living out similar values. They vacation together at the end of the summer, and it reminded me of a trip I took when I had a similar group of friends 20 years ago. I was in grad school, a phase where total absorption in one’s own project is required for survival. Thanks to MacNicol’s buttery little heart, I got to experience a version of life in which feminine self-love balanced with consideration and conviviality continues well into middle-age.

FWIW, the buzz around this book had prepared me for a certain explicitness. I found it more PG-13. While there’s enough detail to convince the reader it was hot in real life, MacNicol keeps most specifics to herself. This was really okay— All Fours, my next read, had the specifics covered.

If I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself is the middle-aged, post-pandemic Eat, Pray, Love,
All Fours by Miranda July is The Awakening meets Vladimir. They have an affair, then discover they both once slept with Portnoy’s Complaint. Awakening has a baby who looks like the one in Lorrie Moore’s “People Like That Are the Only People Here.” To top it off, she has a fling with Saltburn. Mid-life sexual awakening, neonatal-maternal trauma, masturbation, internalized misogyny, borderline inappropriate mother-son relationships, periods and their impending end: this book contains it all.

When this first came out, I was skeptical. From 2011 through 2020, my husband and I got a lot of mileage out of a marital inside joke based on the infamous Paw-Paw the cat from The Future, but July’s 2014 useless luxury handbag collab left me wondering if the twee silliness would be the end-all for her. The person who wrote All Fours is mature—in the sense of singularly weird and committed to the project of that singularity. In this case, the unsympathetic aspects of the narrator worked for me because July takes some surprising risks with the storyline. It’s clear the weirdness of it serves not only for self-expression but also to illuminate an expansive path toward more contemporary honesty. Honesty among women of a certain age about their experiences—and between those women and the men in their lives, too.

There were many times I had to pause to process what I’d just read and how it was expressing itself in my body: tears, dry-mouthed disbelief, tension. There’s not much consummated sex, but the intimacy is graphic. All Fours is a wild ride, and likely to be on my list of best-of this year. It definitely added some excitement to my own days alone, otherwise focused on the pleasures of taking long walks at my own pace, enjoying silence to read unbroken by the phrase “What’s for dinner?,” and then going to bed by 9 p.m.

I’m telling all my friends: put your seatbelt on and read it! And if you have read it, let me know in the comments: are you a Driver or a Parker?

Speaking of an expansive life…

Can I share some good news with you? I’ve been offered a new job! It aligns with the work I’ve been doing with The Booktender and I can’t stop smiling about it. I’ll share more once all the official business is sorted. In the meantime, picture me giddy. I’ll get to promote literature like it’s my job. 

What it means for The Booktender

All opinions shared at The Booktender will continue to be my own. As my professional and personal interests converge, I realize that new readers may discover my newsletter and understandably conflate it with my role, so I’ll need to make a more explicit disclaimer.

As a first step in navigating this change, I’ve decided to start using Substack’s paywall features more intentionally. When I want to get into something that feels more tender or potentially controversial, I’ll save it for the last section of the post and insert a paywall before that section to provide additional clarity about who’s responsible for the The Booktender commentary. Going forward, any posts that have this feature turned on will arrive in your inbox labeled as PAID.

The Booktender’s signature monthly reading provocations will never have a paywall. I’ll be back in your inbox with the July list this weekend!

Free subscribers also continue to get all weekly posts delivered and will still receive invitations to occasional live author or community events. 

Every post I send to your inbox will have something substantive for all subscribers. Tomorrow the first one with a paywall will conclude the June list reviews, with Andrew Leland’s The Country of the Blind and Salman Rushdie’s Knife. Free subscribers will be able to read most of it and it’s an example of how I’ll be using the PAID feature going forward. With advance notice of what to expect, I hope this won’t be too annoying.

Thanks for your support as I make a big change in the second half of my life. SQUEEEE!

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In case you missed it

June Reading Provocation

Grief is the end of loneliness

Book Talk: Vladimir by Julia May Jonas

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