Is There Still Sex in the City?

by Candace Bushnell

Overview

Twenty years after her sharp, seminal first book Sex and the City reshaped the landscape of pop culture and dating with its fly on the wall look at the mating rituals of the Manhattan elite, the trailblazing Candace Bushnell delivers a new book on the wilds and lows of sex and dating after fifty.

Set between the Upper East Side of Manhattan and a country enclave known as The Village, Is There Still Sex in the City? follows a cohort of female friends—Sassy, Kitty, Queenie, Tilda Tia, Marilyn, and Candace—as they navigate the ever-modernizing phenomena of midlife dating and relationships. There’s “Cubbing,” in which a sensible older woman suddenly becomes the love interest of a much younger man, the “Mona Lisa” Treatment—a vaginal restorative surgery often recommended to middle aged women, and what it’s really like to go on Tinder dates as a fifty-something divorcee. From the high highs (My New Boyfriend or MNBs) to the low lows (Middle Age Madness, or MAM cycles), Bushnell illustrates with humor and acuity today’s relationship landscape and the types that roam it.

Drawing from her own experience, in Is There Still Sex in the City? Bushnell spins a smart, lively satirical story of love and life from all angles—marriage and children, divorce and bereavement, as well as the very real pressures on women to maintain their youth and have it all. This is an indispensable companion to one of the most revolutionary dating books of the twentieth century from one of our most important social commentators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802147264
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	08/06/2019
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	462,963
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

CANDACE BUSHNELL is the critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of Sex and the City, Lipstick Jungle, The Carrie Diaries, One Fifth Avenue, Trading Up, Four Blondes, Summer and the City and Killing Monica. Sex and the City, published in 1996, was the basis for the HBO hit series and two subsequent blockbuster movies. Lipstick Jungle became a popular television series on NBC, as did The Carrie Diaries on the CW.

Read an Excerpt

Six months into my retreat, I got a call from Tina Brown. She had a story idea for me. Now that the appropriate time had passed since my divorce, I should throw myself back into the dating world and write about what it was like to be dating over fifty. I could do internet dating. I could hire a matchmaker. . .

I cut her off.

I don’t think so.

I wasn’t ready to start dating. But most of all, I didn’t want to. I’d been in relationships for nearly thirty-five years. I’d even experienced the full relationship cycle—fall in love, get married, and get divorced.

And now I was supposed to do it all over again? Was engaging in the relationship cycle the only thing I could do with my life? I thought about that good old definition of crazy: Doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result.

It was time to put an end to the cycle. And so I decided for the first time in thirty-four years, to be man-free.

This also meant being sex-free. At this point in my life, I’m not a casual sex person.

I didn’t talk about it, of course. The topic of sex, once the source of so much amusement, embarrassment, fear and joy, rarely came up. My single friends had been single forever and not dating and therefore not getting any, while my married friends were married and dealing with kids and also—I imagined—not getting any.

Editorial Reviews

08/26/2019

In this novel, bestselling author Bushnell (Sex and the City) offers an up-close look at the sometimes steamy, sometimes sedentary sex lives of eligible older women navigating the dating market. Divorced and contentedly living alone, narrator Candace receives a call from famed magazine editor Tina Brown, who suggests she get back to dating­, and writing about it. Candace reluctantly agrees (sex—like “cleaning out the gutters”—has been neglected of late). With characteristic wit and piquant humor, Candace travels between her Upper East Side apartment and a small house in the Long Island Hamptons, where she is joined by a set of aging single girlfriends who are also scouting for sex and/or romance. Candace devotes a spicy chapter to “cubbing” (50-plus women dating men in their 20s), but she doesn’t pursue this approach, warning that “cubs” may just be seeking free rent. She does, however, go out with a 31-year-old musician she finds on the dating app Tinder, and dines with a 75-year-old “senior-age player” (SAP), an older single man of means. Many middle-aged men, she observes, prefer dating much younger women, and finding an “age-appropriate” partner isn’t simple (though not, she proves, impossible). Though it may take some effort both online and IRL, many older women, Bushnell’s self-named character asserts, can date and mate with gusto. With its exploration of familiar themes of female friendship and the conundrums of male/female relationships, Bushnell’s clever new work will be adored by fans of Sex and the City and its HBO and film spin-offs. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Sex and the City

“Bushnell [is] the modern flame carrier of an established literary tradition: that of American (usually New York) women writers depicting the rigid social and slackening sexual rules of a very particular American (and, again, usually New York) set through a mix of close personal knowledge and fiction. Edith Wharton, Dorothy Parker and Mary McCarthy can all be cited, in varying degrees, as Bushnell's predecessors, with a bit of Elaine Dundy thrown in...Compared with the hugely popular television series, the book is tough, unapologetic and jittery with anxiety.... hilarious, hard-edged, delightful, harsh, elegant and fun.”— The Guardian

“The book that sparked a cultural phenomenon.”— Oprah

“I did not move to New York because I watched Sex and the City. I moved to New York because I read it...[it is] dark and cynical and weird....Everyone is mean, and selfish, and complicated, and many of them are not rich, and most of them have wardrobes that go unmentioned... All are reported with Bushnell’s savvy reporter’s eye.”— Garage Vice

"Fascinating....Hilarious."— Los Angeles Times

"Sly...Sharp.”— People

Praise for The Carrie Diaries

“If ever a book resounded with positive messages for young people, it’s this one.”—USA Today

“An enjoyable romp of a read.”— Entertainment Weekly

“An addictive, ingenious origin story.”— Los Angeles Times

From the Publisher

2019-04-28
The further adventures of Candace and her man-eating friends.

Bushnell (Killing Monica, 2015, etc.) has been mining the vein of gold she hit with Sex and the City (1996) in both adult and YA novels. The current volume, billed as fiction but calling its heroine Candace rather than Carrie, is a collection of commentaries and recounted hijinks (and lojinks) close in spirit to the original. The author tries Tinder on assignment for a magazine, explores "cubbing" (dating men in their 20s who prefer older women), investigates the "Mona Lisa" treatment (a laser makeover for the vagina), and documents the ravages of Middle Aged Madness (MAM, the female version of the midlife crisis) on her clique of friends, a couple of whom come to blows at a spa retreat. One of the problems of living in Madison World, as she calls her neighborhood in the city, is trying to stay out of the clutches of a group of Russians who are dead-set on selling her skin cream that costs $15,000. Another is that one inevitably becomes a schlepper, carrying one's entire life around in "handbags the size of burlap sacks and worn department store shopping bags and plastic grocery sacks....Your back ached and your feet hurt, but you just kept on schlepping, hoping for the day when something magical would happen and you wouldn't have to schlep no more." She finds some of that magic by living part-time in a country place she calls the Village (clearly the Hamptons), where several of her old group have retreated. There, in addition to cubs, they find SAPs, Senior Age Players, who are potential candidates for MNB, My New Boyfriend. Will Candace get one?

Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.

Kirkus Reviews