Is There Still Sex In The City?

I read Candace Bushnell’s new book, Is There Still Sex In The City? in one sitting, alternately highlighting brilliant observations and rolling my eyes. I usually love Bushnell’s novels, and quite like her paperback blogs. This book revisits the classic Sex And The City, in the same connected essays kind of style. There’s a chatty first-person narrator, relating her own and her friends’ experiences.  Like the original SatC, there’s a lot of people asking their friends round to talk about men, sex, friendship and occasionally awkward, dated looks at Tinder.  I don’t want to read about how the olds just can’t figure out Tinder, we have  no shortage of thinkpieces on incomprehensible millennial desires and how different dating is now. No, I want to hear about actual experiences of middle-aged dating and romance. 

There’s a lot to like here, with the same kind of sharp observations and honesty that makes her novels work. She talks about husbands who just don’t, whether it’s picking up paper towels or participating in marriage, while their wives do all the adulting. And honestly, haven’t we all met this couple before? There’s also a lot about the enduring value of female friendships.

Bushnell’s novels drip with wealth and privilege, and it’s usually such great fun to slip into that world. Here, though, it was hard to go along with the anecdote about multi-thousand-dollar facials, because it felt like a tone-deaf complaint about pushy salespeople. (Geez, even the girl friends buying houses in the same stylish town seems like a hopelessly unrealistic dream for our generation.)

If you read One Fifth Avenue and you wondered what Mindy Gooch’s blog would be like, this is it.