Shallower than Tinder
Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell is back in New York and looking for love online, but there are more clichés than insight, finds Fiona Sturges
Candace Bushnell’s memoir begins with her dog dropping dead from an aneurysm near New York’s Washington Square Park. Your heart goes out to her as she struggles in vain to get him into a taxi and to a vet. But by the end of the book, which purports to examine the life and loves of 21st-century women in the throes of middle age, you envy the dog’s quick and painless exit.
Bushnell is best known as the author of Sex and the City ,the New York Observer column that was turned into an era-defining TV series which shone a light on sex and female friendship, and later into two dizzyingly terrible films.
Here we find her newly divorced, living alone and, after a period living in the sticks of Connecticut, returning to dating in the city.
But where to start? She goes cycling in the hope of snagging a strapping cyclist, but ends up taking a tumble and packing herself and her bike into an Uber. She spruces up her wardrobe on Madison Avenue, where she raises an eyebrow at the snooty
staff, the fancy changing rooms and extortionate prices. At no point does she consider going somewhere more affordable.
She gathers a group of millennials and generation Z-ers to her apartment to help her get to grips with online dating. When a young woman asks what dates were like 20 years ago, Bushnell smugly wonders: “Should I tell them about the helicopter rides? Or the long, romantic dinners at the Ritz in Paris? The yachts? The gondolas in Venice?”
While standing outside a black-tie dinner, she gets talking to a Russian woman who is wearing a cocktail dress and thigh-high boots, and grills her about her experiences of Tinder. The two engage in a conversation that could have been conceived specifically for a low-budget TV pilot: “Women never change. It’s the same old story. We women don’t know what we want,” declares the Russian triumphantly.
Metropolitan clichés are chucked about with abandon: Bushnell talks of the Park Avenue princesses (rich, foreign), the Madison World blonde
Is There Still Sex in the City?
By Candace Bushnell Little, Brown, 272pp, £16.99 (rich, desperate), along with cubs, cougars and catnips, appellations that reinforce long-held clichés and reduce all concerned to cartoon characters. She devotes 18 gaspingly dull pages to a $4,000 facial. She knows it’s a con but agrees to have it anyway, seemingly with the sole intent of wringing a chapter out of it.
Even more maddening are her claims of poverty, despite the fact that, after her divorce, she pays off a mortgage and continues to maintain multiple properties.
But if Bushnell is objectionable, her friends are worse, from the ex-wife of a multimillionaire who sleeps with the boy hired to install an airconditioning unit (his co-worker later threatens to blackmail her), to the woman who knowingly marries a selfish idiot for his money, only to complain later that he’s a selfish idiot.
As paeans to mid-life empowerment go, this book is flimsy, patronising and frequently disingenuous. The writing is also breathtakingly bad – “Thoughts are like little feet,” Bushnell writes. “They start making a path that then becomes a trough of self-doubt and despair.”
Ultimately, there is nothing here for a forty- or fiftysomething woman who isn’t flush from a divorce settlement and planning to peel back the years via ludicrously overpriced treatments. Those mid-lifers shopping for sensible insight and an injection of self-confidence would do well to look elsewhere. n
She devotes 18 gaspingly dull pages to a $4,000facial,whichshetakesseemingly with the sole aim of writing about it