No One Tells You This: A Memoir
Written by Glynnis MacNicol
Narrated by Allyson Ryan
4/5
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About this audiobook
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If the story doesn’t end with marriage or a child, what then?
This question plagued Glynnis MacNicol on the eve of her 40th birthday. Despite a successful career as a writer, and an exciting life in New York City, Glynnis was constantly reminded she had neither of the things the world expected of a woman her age: a partner or a baby. She knew she was supposed to feel bad about this. After all, single women and those without children are often seen as objects of pity, relegated to the sidelines, or indulgent spoiled creatures who think only of themselves.
Glynnis refused to be cast into either of those roles and yet the question remained: What now? There was no good blueprint for how to be a woman alone in the world. She concluded it was time to create one.
Over the course of her fortieth year, which this memoir chronicles, Glynnis embarks on a revealing journey of self-discovery that continually contradicts everything she’d been led to expect. Through the trials of family illness and turmoil, and the thrills of far-flung travel and adventures with men, young and old (and sometimes wearing cowboy hats), she is forced to wrestle with her biggest hopes and fears about love, death, sex, friendship, and loneliness. In doing so, she discovers that holding the power to determine her own fate requires a resilience and courage that no one talks about, and is more rewarding than anyone imagines.
Intimate and timely, No One Tells You This is a fearless reckoning with modern womanhood and an exhilarating adventure that will resonate with anyone determined to live by their own rules.
Glynnis MacNicol
Glynnis MacNicol is a writer and cofounder of The Li.st. Her work has appeared in print and online for publications including Elle.com (where she was a contributing writer), The New York Times, The Guardian, Forbes, The Cut, Daily News (New York), W, Town & Country, The Daily Beast, mental_floss, and Capital New York. Her series of articles on the Brownsville neighborhood in Brooklyn for Chase’s award-winning “From the Ground Up” package won a 2015 Contently Award. She is the author of the memoir No One Tells You This and the coauthor of There Will Be Blood, a guide to puberty, with HelloFlo founder Naama Bloom. She lives in New York City.
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Reviews for No One Tells You This
120 ratings7 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If you feel like you don't fit in to the conventional expectations for life, I highly recommend that you read or listen to this book. It helped me change my perspective on myself and my life and find some peace with who I am.
5 people found this helpful
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5It was great and engaging
Loved it !
Thanks1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Boring book. It's just a long, endless rant. Skip this one!
1 person found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This was just what I needed to read right now.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I'm really not sure how I feel about this one. There are some passages where the author articulates some of my feelings or experiences right on, better than any explanations I've read or thought myself. But if I'm looking for assurance about my own life, this is not it. MacNicol's experiences as a single person are not my own. She's got a significant and intense network of very close friends and allies, she's living her dream in New York and jetsetting on some pretty amazing adventures. So while I relate to her acknowledgement of happily living an alternate life that women are not brought up to imagine as an option (ie, being satisfied as a single and not a failure simply because she is not married and/or have kids), I can't connect to her on many other levels. This story is as much about a woman dealing with her mother's decline of Parkinson's and dementia as much as accepting singlehood, about embracing the freedom to have adventures as much as accepting the children in her life belong to her friends and sister. This is not the book I thought it was going to be, or needed.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Okay I think I need to give up on reading books by single women as apparently I’m an alien to the group as a whole. Are there any that just live and do their thing and don’t live in a huge city and live it up and date all the time until they feel it’s finally okay to say they’re fine with being alone? I should be the most empathetic reader here yet only felt for the author’s ordeal with her mother’s disease and early death.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This memoir of a woman writing about her life without children and partner was in many ways super relatable to me, but it felt like it was missing some kind of introspection necessary to make it a cohesive whole.