Some truly excellent people have said incredibly nice things

look at the people who blurbed my book!

I’m eight weeks out from book publication, which means I’m shifting into full book launch mode. I must tell you that, while necessary, it is not a terribly enjoyable place to be. For anyone. Of which, I am aware! When people ask me to dinner, or breakfast, or lunch these days, my first question is often whether, perhaps, we should schedule our date in late June since I increasingly have exactly one topic of conversation.

I was a guest on Your New Life Blend podcast this week, and these screengrabs are just magnifique!

People sometimes compare publishing a book to birthing a baby. I have not birthed a baby, but I am one hundred percent certain they are not the same thing. Except for one tiny overlap: If you have ever been around a person with a newborn, or small children, you know they also have only one topic of conversation. Understandably. Book launching is similarly consuming for wildly different reasons.

The main reason is that an enormous amount of the launch falls on the writer’s shoulders. It is a full-time job (regardless of whether you have another job)(so I guess in that way it IS the same as a child, albeit with a very different job description), that does not come with a paycheck or benefits. It didn’t used to be this way. And it bears repeating this is not because the in-house publicists and marketing people are not working hard. They work very, very hard. But there are, as you know based on the fact this is coming to you via a newsletter, a bajillion more platforms these days. And many, many more books. Too many books, as Maris Kreizman wrote the other day. And then there’s Amazon, which warps everything. And the NYT bestsellers list algorithm, which takes on undue importance. And then there are pre-orders. Which are actually very important. This fact is drilled into writer’s heads relentlessly. To the extent that I wonder if some of us aren’t going to have it engraved on our gravestones.

And on and on and on.

I’m going to endeavor not to turn this newsletter into one long weekly book promo, because that is very quickly not enjoyable for anyone. But today is not that day.

Because: BLURBS.

A close friend has been reading the galley of I’M MOSTLY HERE TO ENJOY MYSELF this week and texting me as she goes, which has been enormously enjoyable, I must admit. Friends are the best.

I’m very on the fence about the importance of blurbs. I’d be curious to know whether they make a difference to you as a reader. Do you pick up a book because of a blurb? I truly think the one thing that sells books these days is word of mouth, which is hard to quantify. Though according to this piece in the NYT, book events are hot! (Related: I’ll be posting my dates soon.)

Blurbs are the bane of everyone in publishing. And also, the kindness and generosity of writers who provide them is staggering. It is free labor. I love the writers who agreed to blurb this book. As thinkers. As writers. As people. And I love the blurbs they provided (which, believe me, is not always the case). I sometimes find it difficult to describe my own book, but I love the way they managed to do so. And am extremely grateful.

"In I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, Glynnis MacNicol brilliantly cements her writing legacy as the most ardent supporter of living well, especially for women, amid any and all pressure to suppress our natural exhilaration for being alive. MacNicol’s memoir is a guide for pursuing your own pleasure in body and spirit, not exactly an example for readers to follow, but certainly an invitation to allow themselves all the same freedoms. This isn’t escapism. This is a call to go deeper into what feels most real."
—Ashley C. Ford, New York Times bestselling author of Somebody’s Daughter

"I thought I knew pleasure when I met my husband. But reading this book makes me think I should’ve stayed single in Paris! Finally a model of womanhood beyond kids and marriage, a vision of what it can be to embrace freedom. Every word was a pleasure."
—Katy Tur, anchor of MSNBC’s Katy Tur Reports and New York Times bestselling author of Rough Draft and Unbelievable

"Absolutely triumphant. A rapturous ode to loving yourself through letting others love you, I’m Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself by Glynnis MacNicol is a decadent buffet of pleasures that adds up to so much more. MacNicol takes us on a Seine-backdropped, art-and-bicycle-packed adventure that goes beyond self-discovery or acceptance, and to a deeper place of real self-love. A beautiful, bold, boisterous literary book for those of us who are longing to be touched—the ones who want to pursue the best life has to offer us, and nothing less."
—Isaac Fitzgerald, New York Times bestselling author of Dirtbag, Massachusetts

“In the impermeable narrative that society has given women about getting older, MacNicol has opened a trap door to a world of pleasures, parties, and power. Her lively, succulent account of seeking joy for the hell of it in Paris is a permanent permission slip for all of us to find it for ourselves, right here, at any age. My highest praise for this book is ‘I enjoyed it so much!!’ because that's exactly what MacNicol is teaching us to do in all parts of our lives.”
—Mari Andrew, New York Times bestselling author of Am I There Yet? and My Inner Sky

Good decision: I’ve been savoring the latest Lauren Collins piece all week. Oh, France. “There are nine kinds of foie gras on offer, and five pâtés en croûte, including one known as Sleeping Beauty’s Pillow, which involves a panoply of meats (chicken, duck, wild boar, hare, quail, sweetbreads, ground pork) and is considered by connoisseurs to be “charcuterie’s holy grail.”