Is There Still Sex in the City?

By Candace Bushnell

Published by Little, Brown

More than 20 years after writing Sex and the City, a preternaturally youthful Candace Bushnell stares out from the cover of her new book, Is There Still Sex in the City?, wearing a short, feather-skirted dress. I ask my 17-year-old daughter to guess her age. “Hm, 21?” The woman behind the pop-culture phenomenon that spawned a TV series and two feature films is in fact now 60 — albeit the owner of a great pair of legs.

This gulf between perception and reality is a leitmotif of Is There Still Sex in the City? from the start. Her publisher sells the book as a memoir. Bushnell, in her Instagram posts, calls it a novel. In truth, the book inhabits an ambiguous space between fact and fiction. It follows Bushnell and her middle-aged girl gang of five who’ve swapped Manhattan for a hamlet in the Hamptons, mysteriously referred to here as the Village. There’s Kitty, Queenie, Sassy, Tilda Tia and Marilyn, none apparently their real names and none of them ever developed enough as characters for us to care about them. Age having wearied these women, they’re not as much fun as Sex and the City’s original cosmopolitan-quaffing protagonists, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, though they share admirably strong female friendships and are similarly obsessed with finding new men.

Given the book’s title, the reader might expect Bushnell to cue up endless anecdotes about postmenopausal dating in New York. And yet the question remains largely unanswered. Bushnell returns briefly to the city to try out Tinder (launched in 2012) as if it were the latest sexual incarnation. She has two dates with the hapless musician Jude, before coming to the realisation that Tinder is all about men wanting oral sex, the least disputed fact in the entire book. That pretty much concludes her dating research, barring one subsequent encounter with a 75-year-old and then the joyful discovery of her own Mr Big towards the end, both of which events take place in the Hamptons.

In the course of its 258 pages, Bushnell throws in just one actual sex scene. Mia, a rich divorcée not even in the girl gang, gets soaped up in the shower, rather incongruously, by a 20-year-old air conditioning engineer called Jess. The most memorable line? “Ride ’em cowboy, she thought.” There the sex ends and the meandering musings begin. There are almost 30 pages on “adjacent mothering” when Bushnell’s ex-boyfriend and his child come to stay, and a mind-numbing 21 pages on when she’s supposedly conned into spending $4,000 on face creams by one of those street charlatans who press samples into your hand.

Which brings me to something else that fails to ring true — Bushnell’s endless pleading of poverty. The Hamptons, playground of New York’s rich, is hardly Hounslow, and Bushnell herself is estimated to be worth $40m.

Despite her tussles with the truth, Bushnell makes some interesting observations about ageing and being childless, but her narrative always manages to fall short of being witty and droll. Witness one of her more bewildering analogies: “Thoughts are like little feet. They start making a path that then becomes a trough of self-doubt and despair.” Dorothy Parker she is not.

Even if this is the memoir her publishers claim it to be, Bushnell only ever exposes the top layer of her emotional skin, and never anything deeper and more interesting. Her divorce from the former ballet dancer Charles Askegard is dismissed in less than four lines. The death of her father, an Apollo space mission scientist, is touched on with equal dispassion. “And so the day came. I called up MNB (My New Boyfriend). ‘My father died,’ I said, and then I cried a little.”

What takes precedence are puerile acronyms such as MAM (Middle Aged Madness) and UCP (Unexpected Cub Pounce — don’t ask), and drummed-up relationship genres like the Hot Drop (an unintentionally single man), the Spouse-Child (immature husbands) and the Super Middles (fit, ageless people). Will diehard fans of Bushnell and the original SATC series, now themselves in their fifties, care that it’s a literary hot mess? Probably not. Sex and the City 2 was panned by the critics yet made a $200m profit, and Paramount TV has bought the rights to this latest offering.

Brace yourself for a heavily botoxed Bushnell character, appearing more twentysomething than 60, on your screens sometime soon.