Is there still Sex in the City for over-50s? Yes, yes, yes!
Toyboys begging for a liaison — in the shower! Eye-opening adventures on Tinder. And now (sorry, Mr Big) a man who makes her truly fulfilled. Twenty years on from THAT book, Candace Bushnell bares all...
SEX And The City writer Candace Bushnell was in the throes of ‘Middle-Aged Madness’ — her characteristically snappy description of the menopausal years — when a ‘super-sexy’ 30-year-old hit on her at a pool party four years ago. ‘Hey, let’s take a shower,’ he suggested. Candace, now 60, shrugs in a knowing way. ‘So I did,’ she says. ‘These guys don’t waste any time. They’re really fast. We were starting to make out — and, suddenly, I was like: “You know what? I can’t do this. I know what’s going to happen and, before you know it, it’s going to be over and done with.”
‘Because you need to spend at least four hours over this. You need to at least have a conversation first.’
It’s clear that Candace has been through something of a metamorphosis.
The writer — whose seminal first book, based on her column for The New York Observer, was adapted into the phenomenally successful TV series of the same name, starring Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw — encouraged a generation of women worldwide to embrace their sexual freedom.
However, while Candace is famous for her no-holds-barred depictions of modern dating, she now seems to have become rather less physically carefree. So what’s changed her?
Undoubtedly, she confesses, part of it is what she’s dubbed ‘Middle-Aged Madness’, or MAM (while she may be different in some respects, her acuity in creating snappy acronyms for shared experiences remains sharp).
But, in the 22 years since the first Sex And The City book was published, she has also experienced the lows commonly associated with our middle years: heartache, a marriage breakdown, the crushing experience of feeling invisible as an older woman and bereavement.
She’s also had a long period of celibacy, albeit not of her choosing.
And she has navigated a new intimate landscape: that of dating app Tinder, online hook-ups, even ‘cubbing’ — an experience whereby, let’s say, a woman of a certain age is pursued by a chap young enough to be her grandson, just as she was at that pool party.
‘I think it’s because of the amount of porn they watched as kids,’ she says of this eyewateringly liberated attitude to sex among today’s young. ‘Cubbing has got to the point where my friends and I are open-mouthed.’
WHILE two decades ago, Candace helped define the fantasies and frustrations of thirtysomethings — from commitment-phobic boyfriends, to whether your orgasms were earthshaking enough, not to mention affording all those Manolo Blahnik stilettos — now she’s decided to chronicle the landscape of middleage, in her new, typically candid book, Is There Still Sex In The City?, for all those women who find themselves dating again in their 50s and 60s.
Judging from the breathless reviews it’s received in the States, it could be as socially significant as its predecessor.
Based on her own circle of friends (think Sex And The City, but fastforward 20 years), it follows a group of fiftysomethings, Sassy, Kitty, Queenie, Tilda Tia, Marilyn and Candace herself, who are reaping the seeds they sowed in their haveit-all, self-obsessed youth.
In short, they’re single and low on oestrogen and cash, splashing out the little they have on bizarre, age-defying therapies such as ‘The Mona lisa Treatment’, which involves targeting your lady bits with a laser to ‘rejuvenate’ them.
It is, Candace assures me, ‘all the rage in The Hamptons. Sometimes,
I think about having it done — although the reality is it’s probably a placebo kind of thing. Maybe it’s permission to engage in that part of your life again’.
It’s at this point that Candace confides she was celibate for five years after her painful separation from her husband of ten years, ballet dancer Charles Askegard, in 2011. ‘Friends were like: “Five years? That’s such a long time.”
‘No it’s not. Why do people worry so much about it? It’s not like I was wanting to go without sex. It’s just the opportunity . . . ’
The sentence ends in a frown. ‘I’m not going to lie, this book is about a journey I took through my 50s,’ she says. ‘You go through certain things — things that f*** you up. But you’ve got to just keep going.’
We meet in a Manhattan bistro, the sort of place where Candace’s alter ego Carrie Bradshaw knocked back Cosmopolitans with her pals Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda.
Today, though, Candace limits herself to a single glass of champagne and waxes lyrical about balance: exercise, eating well and keeping things ‘on an even keel’.
Indeed, as the book observes, extreme moderation is the guiding principle for a new clique of middleaged women and men Candace calls the ‘Super-Middle’ — think more vitamins than Viagra: they are obsessed with their health and maintaining a youthful appearance fit for the Instagram age.
‘Of course, it’s not as interesting,’ she says. ‘But it’s how you get through this Middle-Aged Madness, this MAM. It’s like a kind of adolescence, in a way. What’s really happening is your brain is going from the reproductive brain to the non-reproductive brain. You are losing those hormones. It’s a time when you realise a lot of the decisions you previously made were kind of based on...I don’t want to say just hormones, but you now can’t get all worked up about stuff the way you did before. So it’s good, but also bad in a way, because where’s your passion?’
As well as physical changes, Candace and her friends have struggled with the trials everyday later life can bring.
‘Suddenly, I had five girlfriends who were getting divorced,’ she says. ‘They knew other women who all seemed to be going through the same thing.
‘It wasn’t just divorce, it was a pile of other things, such as children leaving the nest, having to downsize for financial reasons, or recharging a career you’d let slide.
‘It seemed everybody was in the same situation. There was a lot of pain. Women are in pain and scared — because you feel like what you relied on in the past to get through, you can’t rely on any more.
‘You realise you are invisible. If you go to buy something in a store, you go up to the counter and the assistant doesn’t even look at you. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience? All of a sudden, one
day, you notice it.’ She pauses. Candace’s early ambition was to be an actress, and there is something of the performer about her as thoughts pass through her sharp, observant brain. For now, her voice is low, her face sombre, as she leans across our table.
‘A lot of stuff is going to happen to you in your 50s. People die. Your parents die. There’s sometimes an unimaginable sense of loss and disappointment.
‘I was sad for a very good reason when I was writing this book: my father died and my friend committed suicide. She was going to get married. Then she killed herself.
‘I felt despondent. I think suicide is something that goes through one’s head. But there’s a big difference between somebody who does it and somebody who’s: “Oh, I’m so upset.” ’
Today, Candace is in a relationship with millionaire property developer Jim Coleman, 57, to whom she refers in her book as ‘MNB’ — My New Boyfriend (they have been together for two years).
Her sexual mores have changed: out go the bad guys, in comes the ‘good guy’.
Ironically, she met Coleman several years ago through Chris Noth, the actor who played the ultimate bad guy, Sex And The City’s Mr Big. At the time, however, she wasn’t really interested.
That was then, though. ‘One of the things I’ve noticed is that my friends are with guys they probably wouldn’t even have looked at when they were younger. They no longer want to be with somebody who’s an a ****** e. They just want to be with someone who’s nice.
‘Jim is really considerate. He’s a good guy. We were seated next to each other at dinner two years ago and started seeing each other. This new middle age seems to be a chance to get relationships a little bit more right.’
Candace, of course, spent her first five decades getting relationships spectacularly wrong, just like Carrie Bradshaw in her onoff onscreen romance with Mr Big. ‘Ron Galotti,’ Candace says today, for the first time confirming the identity of the man who inspired Mr Big. Candace met former Vogue and GQ publisher Galotti at a party in 1995 when she was writing her New York Observer dating column on which Sex And The City was based.
‘I was really in love with him. He had a lot of bluster on the outside, but he had a good heart and tried to be a good person. He’s married now and he’s got a kid, so he’s happy as can be.
‘I guess I thought we would get married. But he didn’t want to get married to me at all. He split up with me.’
Again, she puts her fork down on her lobster salad and leans across the table. ‘You know what? I always get dumped, but it’s great to be able to have these kind of conversations without crumbling and falling apart.’
Is There Still Sex In The City? begins with Candace’s divorce. She was 52 when her marriage to Askegard — which she had rushed into just eight weeks after meeting him — fell apart, with Candace claiming he had an affair.
‘Let’s just say it was like all of these stories: there was evidence [of an affair], but I didn’t see it. My husband asked for a divorce and my girlfriends said: “He’s probably having an affair.” I said: “No, he’s not. He says he’s not. I’m on good terms with him.”
‘They said: “Men don’t just leave relationships.” I was like: “Well, in my case, they do. I’m going to be the lucky one.” ’
She later claims: ‘Then I realised I wasn’t the lucky one. I found a trail. Communications. I was another dupe. I was really mad. I’d been upset when he asked for a divorce. When I found that [the affair] out, I was really upset.’ Askegard declined to comment on the allegation at the time. Within a year, Candace left New York for rural Connecticut.
‘I didn’t see anybody for three years,’ she says. ‘I just wrote all the time. I guess maybe I was harnessing the pain.’
Much of what Candace wrote went unpublished, until her 2015 novel Killing Monica, starring a Carrie Bradshawstyle heroine, who, after spawning a series of blockbuster films, tried to kill off her fictional character. The book was critically reviled.
‘At the time, it was horrifying,’ she admits. ‘I thought I was going insane.’ She shakes her head. ‘The life of a writer is so up and down. I always feel like I have money worries.’ Hang on, Candace. Rewind. Aren’t you worth £30million from the Sex And The City television series and movies? ‘Not at all,’ she says. ‘I’m worth a couple of million dollars, so I’m not broke, but I’m not worth millions and millions. In terms of a TV show such as Sex And The City, I have a standard contract. When they make a billion dollars I make, maybe, half a million dollars.’ I wonder if she regrets never having had children. ‘I was engaged when I was 23 or 24 to a Jewish doctor,’ she says. ‘I was crazy about him and really wanted to get married. ‘His mother wouldn’t let us — or maybe he didn’t want to get married.’ She shrugs. ‘Anyway, we had to break up. It was horrible. I went home and cried for a month. If we had got married, I would have had kids, but I probably wouldn’t have been a writer, and I definitely wouldn’t have written Sex And The City.’
TODAY, Candace has a 700 sq ft apartment in New York and a home in Long Island’s exclusive Sag Harbor, to where she moved three years ago.
She is largely content — and, indeed, thanks her lucky stars she’s not on the onlinedominated romantic scene today, after recently having a taste of dating in midlife when she was commissioned by Cosmopolitan magazine to write an article about Tinder.
‘I can tell you I was nervous,’ she says. ‘I hadn’t done that kind of reporting for such a long time, but I fell right back into it.’
These experiences on Tinder spawned her new book. ‘I was pretty fascinated by how gently unhappy these women were in their 20s,’ she says. ‘They honestly asked me what was it like to date in real life. That blew me away.’
Writing gave Candace purpose. Today, life is a whirl of activity.
‘You know something? It doesn’t really matter what your choices are, you have to go through this MAM. It’s about resilience.
‘Once you’ve gone through it — and, for me, I was probably 58 — you’re left with a brain that’s more balanced, so there’s an opportunity to think in a new way. You don’t give a s*** so much.
‘You no longer need to define a relationship or put a stamp on things. Maybe I’ll marry Jim some time in the future — who knows?
‘For the first time in my life, I’m not in a rush. It’s OK for things just to be. If you’re in your 50s and healthy, you have a good chance of living until you’re 90, so I have a chunk of 30 or 40 years ahead of me. The best thing you can do is just keep getting up to bat.’
IS THERE Still Sex In The City? by Candace Bushnell, published by Little, Brown on August 8 at £16.99. © Candace Bushnell 2019. To order a copy for £13.59 (offer valid to August 16, 2019, P&P free on orders over £15), call 0844 571 0640.