No One Tells You This

May 15, 2018
A successful journalist's account of how she came to terms with being a single woman over 40.Feisty and independent, MacNicol (co-editor: The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Women, 2014) had "taken herself from waitress to well-paid writer to business owner" in the span of 20 years. Now she was a glamorous Manhattanite with a wide circle of friends and access to famous and accomplished people. Yet as she neared 40, she realized she lacked two things society deemed necessary for female success: a man and a baby. In this sharp, intimate memoir, the author chronicles the eventful years following the 40th birthday that found her unattached and unsure about her path forward. Men walked in and out of her real and online lives as she traveled to offbeat locations for stories. While she still saw the women friends she had come to know during her 20s, responsibilities to partners, husbands, and children inevitably loosened ties. A close relationship to her married sister allowed her to witness firsthand the vagaries of matrimony and the rigors of parenting, while her housewife mother increasingly came to symbolize the life MacNicol "actively unwanted." The contrast between the outcomes of her mother's lifestyle and her own became especially clear as she witnessed her mother's decline into dementia. The author became painfully aware that the choice to forge a life built around family was no safeguard to "being left alone" in the end and that, ultimately, "life was not a savings plan, accrued now for enjoyment later." Moving through the years without a ready-made blueprint was a struggle, but one that had been "terrifying, and then exhausting, and then delightful." Unapologetic in her embrace of the ups and downs of the improvised solo life, MacNicol offers a refreshing view of the possibilities--and pitfalls--personal freedom can offer modern women.A funny, frank, and fearless memoir.

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June 18, 2018
Macnicol, co-founder of TheLi.st, a networking platform for working women, incisively examines what she wants in her personal life versus what society tells her she’s supposed to want: namely, a partner and kids. In her late 30s, Macnicol was a successful freelance writer for several magazines, but got so burned out by the 18-hour days that she eventually quit. It took two years for her to find her footing again, and she eventually returned to writing and founded her website. She reflects on the path of her stay-at-home mother as well as her own independent, jet-setting life (“I had known early on that I did not want my mother’s life. If anything, I actively unwanted it”). She also looks to her friends who have paired off (some are happy; others confess they should have been less afraid to be single) as well as her sister, who discovered she was pregnant just as she had separated from her husband. Society, Macnicol writes, views single, childless women with pity, yet Macnicol takes pleasure in being a woman in charge of her own life. The self-affirming wisdom Macnicol gained about herself will resonate with countless women and men who wrestle with the same societal pressures.