Glynnis MacNicol No One Tells You This Memoir Excerpt

Eight hours before my fortieth birthday, I sat alone at my desk on the seventeenth floor of an office building in downtown Manhattan, unable to shake the conviction that midnight was hanging over me like a guillotine. I was certain that come the stroke of twelve my life would be cleaved in two, a before and an after: all that was good and interesting about me, that made me a person worthy of attention, considered by the world to be full of potential, would be stripped away, and whatever remained would be thrust, unrecognizable, into the void that awaited.

It was ridiculous. Deep down, I knew it was ridiculous. However, knowing this did not keep me from anxiously glancing at the clock out in the hallway as if the hands on it were actual blades.

I thought of my mother, of course. Whether or not we actually resemble the image we see, our mothers are our first, and most lasting, reflection of ourselves: a mirror we gaze into from birth until death.

I was eight when my mother turned forty, and sensed an abandon all hope, ye who enter here message woven into the colorful birthday cards that arrived in the mail for her. As if simply by turning forty, my mother had somehow failed at something. And now here I was so many years later, about to turn forty myself, gripped by those identical fears despite all my determination to be otherwise. Eight-year-old me would have been revolted.

I pulled out my phone, automatically angled my head in a well-practiced tilt, and took a selfie. I was aware that to the outside world I could not have appeared less like a woman who should be worried about her age, less like someone who was now spending the last hours before her birthday seized by the belief she was being marched to her demise. In all likelihood, even my friends would have been surprised to hear it. I was not known as a person who tended to cower; I was a person who kept going, who took care of things, who always had the answer, who rarely asked for help. I knew what I wanted, and what I liked, which was probably why most of my friends had taken me at my word when I said I didn’t want a birthday party.

I’d spent much of the year being the good daughter, the good sister, the good friend. My mother had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s not that long ago, and the speed of its progression had left us breathless; my sister was home alone with two small children and a third on the way. I’d been the emergency contact for more than a few of my friends whose marriages were imploding, who’d suffered family tragedies. Far from spending the summer panicking about my age, I had instead occasionally wondered whether the world was conspiring to do me a very cruel favor: It sometimes felt as though so many the things a single, childless woman on the eve of her forties is supposed to be most fearful of never having attained—the right guy, the happy marriage, the babies, the not-dying-alone—had been lined up for my inspection and then, one by one, unveiled to reveal the worst-case scenario. It wasn’t that I was missing out on happy endings; there were no happy endings!

Still, it was a truth universally acknowledged—gleaned from stacks of literature, countless movies, and decades of magazine purchases I’d made—that by age forty I was supposed to have a certain kind of life, one that, whatever else it might involve, included a partner and babies. Having acquired neither of these, it was nearly impossible, no matter how smart, educated, or lucky I was, not to conclude that I had officially become the wrong answer to the question of what made a woman’s life worth living. If this story wasn’t going to end with a marriage or a child, what then? Could it even be called a story?


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My friend and now business partner, Rachel, had been offering to throw me a party all week. She wasn’t the only one. There were a half dozen friends I could text right now, who would meet me at any place I chose. Whatever else it was, my birthday was not the story of a lonely woman. But I did not want a party. A party felt like a delay tactic. A distraction. A weakness. If it was true that I was likely going to be alone for the rest of my life, let’s see how alone I could be.

It was now five o’clock. Was I really going to go home? Sad, sad Glynnis retreating to her studio apartment, defeated by her age. This could not be the story of my birthday. More than anything, it was just too boring. In an effort to avoid appearing pathetic, it was starting to occur to me that I was being very pathetic. At the very least I’d take myself out for a drink at the Bemelmans Bar, the Upper East Side institution on the ground floor of the Carlyle Hotel.

Newly fired up by my plan, I opened my computer and looked up hotel room rates at the Carlyle. I could pack a pair of silk pajamas, have a martini at Bemelmans, and wake up to a stroll in Central Park.

Good Lord.

I closed the tab almost as quickly as I’d opened it. Not even the most acrobatic, panicked, you-only-turn-forty-once rationalizations could justify half a month’s (already obscenely high) rent on one night in a hotel. But I’d hit on the missing piece: I was desperate to be in motion. To have a destination on a day that was leaving me feeling paralyzed and without purpose.

I turned over the city in my head. Suddenly I recalled the newly opened motel out in the Rockaways I’d heard people talking about over the summer. The Rockaways were technically a part of Queens, a little peninsula that jutted out into the water southeast of Coney Island and lined on all sides with beaches. The neighborhood had the feel of a beach town even though it was possible to see the city’s skyline in the distance. Another world inside the same city, only a subway ride away. It was one of New York’s better magic tricks. I Googled the hotel. It was open! A few more clicks and I had booked a seventy-five-dollar room. Just like that, I’d managed to tilt the world just enough to let it refill with some possibility.

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The smell of the sea rushed at me when I exited the subway car. The motel was on the far corner, and as I made my way down the vacant block the only noise came from the international flights out of JFK that were taking off in their regular intervals overhead.

I’d been emailed a code when I’d paid online; the instructions said to use it to access the front door and also my room, and now I understood why: there was no reception desk or check-in person.

Once inside, I climbed a flight of stairs. It was silent. Could I really be the only one here? I stopped and listened for the sound of any human movement but could hear only the faint noise of a city bus pulling away out on the street. In the silence the hall looked long and foreboding. I walked quickly, forcing myself to punch the keypad beside my door calmly. I was in. I promptly locked the door behind me, considering briefly the lack of a dead bolt. My stomach grumbled. I crossed my fingers there was a kitchen at the bar, thinking it was going to be a long night if there wasn’t, and headed back down.

The bar looked like the kind of bright white and airy surfer place one might find somewhere on the coast of California, not at the edges of New York City. Except for a handful of people, all of whom were hunched over their drinks in a way that suggested they were regulars, and some kids in the corner, the room was mostly empty. I ordered a gin and tonic, grabbed an empanada from a tray, and took a table to myself. It was open mic night, and a few locals had begun to line the walls, holding their instruments, waiting their turn. As I wolfed down the empanada and sipped at my drink, two young black kids took the stage. They were both in surfer shorts and sandals; their hair grew high and wild above their heads. They couldn’t have been more than sixteen. “Hey there,” one said into the mic, waving at the room, before moving back and nodding to his partner. After a few false starts they began to play a very faithful version of “Twist and Shout.”

When I’d first set foot in New York, age twenty-three, it had been like one of those videos of captured animals being released back into the wild: The world immediately, finally made sense. I felt lucky, which in those days I’d found more reassuring than professional accolades or words of encouragement. Who knew what was around the corner or through a door? Who knew what the night might bring? Anything was possible. It had been a long time since I’d felt that way. Now, as the two kids on stage shifted from the Beatles to Radiohead’s “Karma Police,” and their earnestness and unlikely music choice wove its way around me—this is what you’ll get when you mess with us—mixing with the sea air that breezed in through the open doorway, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the perfectness of it all. The wholeness. The incongruity and unexpectedness of two surfer kids out here with electrified hair, singing their hearts out to Radiohead. This was how I’d wanted to feel. I needed to be reminded that life was not a done deal. I was not a done deal.

I put my empty glass on the bar, pushed the change the bartender handed me back to my twenty for a tip, and left.

The beach was a block away. I reached the sand and walked up to the dark boardwalk. The beach was deserted in both directions; above me there was the faint glow of the moon behind the clouds. I could hear the waves breaking in a regular rhythm, but all I could see was a large, dark expanse that reached out and out, broken here and there by a ghostly whitecap. Lights from ships far out at sea flickered in the distance like tiny candles.

It was nearing midnight. I gazed at the dark water for a long time, thinking how it made the perfect metaphor for the uncharted waters of the decade ahead. I let myself be overwhelmed by the idea that I had no sense of what the coming years would contain and no clue how to navigate through them. So few of the cautionary tales that had been told to me had panned out: I hadn’t become a tabloid headline, the career hadn’t ended, the empty motel marked a new beginning, not my demise.

I was determined to do better from this point, leaving certain baggage behind me. So many bad decisions, bad habits, bad relationships. I also knew, now that I was finally here and there was no more time for last-minute swerve-offs, that there were other things I was going to be required to leave behind. I made myself list them in my head. There might never be a child. I might always be alone. More than that, I was going to have to figure out how to live well in a world that had given me little indication that was possible. I didn’t know how I was going to do that, just that I had to try. If I had a birthday resolution for the year ahead, that was it.

I made myself say it out loud: I might always be alone. It sounded less overwhelming against the noise of the breaking waves. I laughed. Fuck off, I thought, I am done feeling bad. And then aloud: I can do whatever I want. Just then I remembered seeing Patti Smith, two summers before, reading an old poem at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, the city aflame behind her in the setting summer sun. I’m gonna get out of here, she said, as if she were once again that young girl who’d written those lines decades ago. She was going to get on that train and go to New York City. She was never going to return, no never. She was going to travel light. How I loved that. Oh, watch me now, she’d said. As if she was about to perform the world’s greatest magic trick.

Oh, watch me now, I thought. Then I turned around and went back to my room.

Copyright © 2018 by Glynnis MacNicol. From NO ONE TELLS YOU THIS: A Memoir by Glynnis MacNicol to be published by Simon & Schuster, Inc. Printed by permission.