Confronting single life at 40 isn’t all that bad

No One Tells You This Glynnis MacNicol Simon & Schuster On its surface, Glynnis MacNicol’s memoir seems simple, even mundane: a straight, single woman turns 40 and faces the challenge of defining herself and her life in the absence of marriage and children.

As a successful journalist living in New York, MacNicol is aware of the privilege that has allowed her to find fulfilment in work and friendship rather than conventional domesticity. But as the title of her beguiling autobiography suggests — No One Tells You This — MacNicol struggles with the many unknowns that lie ahead. If her story doesn’t end with marriage and children, she wonders, “could it even be called a story?”

For MacNicol, 40, looms large as the biological cutoff for having children. She dryly articulates the way single women in their late 30s come to think of their lives as “a shifting math problem,” an experiment in how little time can be allowed to elapse between meeting a man and having a baby (“married next week, and pregnant the next morning?”). Eventually, she admits, “there was no way to make the numbers add up.”

So the calculus shifts again: Is this something she really wants? MacNicol’s business partner, single at 41, chooses to have a baby by herself, while MacNicol’s sister, married with two young children, discovers she’s pregnant just as she and her husband separate.

Sitting alone in the early morning while she holds her sister’s newborn, MacNicol forces herself to confront the visceral appeal of a child with the murkier question of what her life would look like without one. That means taking her own life seriously, as the product of deliberate choice, “not simply a makeshift thing I’d constructed as a for-the-time-being existence.”

MacNicol chooses to mark her 40th birthday by spending it alone at a hipster motel in a Queens beach neighbourhood. She buries her phone in her bag and reflects on the difference between her own looming fifth decade and that of her mother — who by that age was a married, stay-at-home mother of two young children. MacNicol, meanwhile, is extricating herself from a relationship with a married man, while carrying on an intense text-message flirtation with an unidentified celebrity.

MacNicol adopts a tone of affectionate awe when writing about the important women in her life, the friends whose lives have intertwined with hers from her early days in the city as a 20-something waitress.

This chosen family offers her support and companionship, but also a glimpse of the way that stories can twist and rupture. Over the course of the year that the memoir chronicles, these expected endings are in turn “unveiled to reveal the worst-case scenario.” Being a witness to tragedy — divorce, illness, stillbirth — places a guilty kind of pressure on the single protagonist, who worries that she’s becoming an “emotional vampire, borrowing other people’s misfortune and challenges as my own.” This sense of living outside the charmed circle of the nuclear family is persistent, but MacNicol comes to realize that this circle is much less secure than she has believed. Life at that slight remove, she learns, can be liberating. On a road trip that runs via a dude ranch in Wyoming, MacNicol finds herself so awed and inspired by the landscape that when she gets home she arranges to fly right back and stay for a month, reasoning this is exactly the sort of adventure she is supposed to be having, in a life beholden to nobody else’s plans.

A young man with a motorbike offers a brief diversion, but he and the other men in the book, including an Icelandic tour guide and a boldly dishonest Tinder date, are not serious long-term romantic prospects.

When there’s no clock ticking, MacNicol discovers, men become simply a source of pleasure. With that awareness comes power, the power of “furies and witches and sorceresses and harpies,” complete in themselves and in charge of their decisions.