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 highs 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? gathers Bushnell’s signature short, sharp, satirical commentaries on the love and dating habits of middle-aged men and women as they continue to navigate the ever-modernizing world of relationships. Throughout, Bushnell documents twenty-first century dating phenomena, such as the “Unintended Cub Situation” 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 divorcée. Bushnell also updates one of her most celebrated stories from Sex and the City, about “Bicycle Boys,” a breed of New York man who is always trying to bring his bike up to women’s apartments. Once an anomaly, Bushnell charts their new ubiquitousness, in addition to where, and how, to do your own man stalking via bicycle (and whether or not it’s worth it).
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 highs 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? gathers Bushnell’s signature short, sharp, satirical commentaries on the love and dating habits of middle-aged men and women as they continue to navigate the ever-modernizing world of relationships. Throughout, Bushnell documents twenty-first century dating phenomena, such as the “Unintended Cub Situation” 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 divorcée. Bushnell also updates one of her most celebrated stories from Sex and the City, about “Bicycle Boys,” a breed of New York man who is always trying to bring his bike up to women’s apartments. Once an anomaly, Bushnell charts their new ubiquitousness, in addition to where, and how, to do your own man stalking via bicycle (and whether or not it’s worth it).
| Published By | House of Anansi Press Inc — Aug 6, 2019 |
| Specifications | 272 pages | 5.5 in x 8.25 in |
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Excerpt |
| Written By |
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. Both Lipstick Jungle and The Carrie Diaries became popular television series. |
| Written By |
|
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. Both Lipstick Jungle and The Carrie Diaries became popular television series. |
“Perhaps no one has better excavated our kinky underpinnings than Candace Bushnell, author of the original ‘Sex and the City’ columns and progenitor of the show that made Manolo a household name. Fifteen years after Carrie Bradshaw sighed her last ‘I couldn't help but wonder,’ Bushnell is back with Is There Still Sex in the City? The protagonist, Candace, is a recently divorced writer who trades her Manhattan life for a cottage in the Hamptons . . . [Is There Still Sex in the City? is] brimming with the snappy rhetorical questions and taxonomic acronyms that became Bushnell's signature back in the stiletto days . . . While Carrie was a bright-eyed anthropologist, Candace and her friends are survivalists; even beyond the City, it's a jungle out there.” —Vogue
“Sometimes it can be fun to wonder what became of our fictional heroines . . . what of Carrie Bradshaw? After she bagged her Mr. Big, did she list her $40,000 shoe collection on eBay, move to the suburbs, have a bunch of kids, and grow old gracefully? Or did Carrie find herself in her fifties child-free, single again, and wondering how to get back in the game, only to have her gynecologist recommend a Mona Lisa laser treatment because ‘your vagina is not flexible enough’? Ugh. Such are the humiliations awaiting the female in middle age. That you-gotta-laugh-or-you-cry place is where Candace Bushnell, with her usual sparkling candor, begins Is There Still Sex in the City?.” —New York Times
“The book captures the buoyancy of the writer’s brand . . . As with the show, there’s a lot to relish. Bushnell’s portrayals of the women in her circle somehow feel both forgiving and clinical, with an anthropologist’s matter-of-factness . . . Bushnell wrestles smartly with the theme of aging, with how being a ‘fiftysomething’ woman is different from being a ‘thirtysomething’ woman . . . This Bushnell writes most gracefully about topics that are not sex and dating . . . The city is big, Bushnell implies, but not endless. The sex never left it. But was sex ever really the point?” —New Yorker
“Bushnell’s voice is as knowing and sharp as ever . . . As with SATC’s ‘toxic bachelors’ and ‘modelizers,’ there’s a new taxonomy: ‘Cubbing,’ the pursuit of older women by younger men; or ‘MAM,’ for middle-aged madness, a late-onset midlife crisis for women. She also updates a chapter on ‘bicycle boys’ — then, the charmingly rumpled literary types on vintage bikes, now wealthy guys in Lycra.” —Washington Post
“While [Bushnell] doesn’t bring back Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, or Samantha, it feels a bit like we’re at brunch with middle-aged versions of those archetypes, and they’re still talking about love and sex because, well, of course. The book, part memoir, part fiction, is a guide to the Ides of Fifty . . . Much like in the original SATC, Bushnell and her friends experience every romantic possibility so we don’t have to . . . Bushnell also touches on poignant aspects of what she calls ‘middle-aged madness’: the death of a parent, the isolation of divorce, the ache of realizing that even the most gorgeous among us will eventually become invisible.” —Time Magazine
“As she did in her bestselling Sex in the City, Bushnell examines her own and her friends’ experiences with dry wit, delivering sharp social observations about the trials and piquant pleasures of looking for love at a certain age.” —People Magazine
“It’s hard out there for a cougar. But for Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell, it’s exactly the age when women need her the most. Her latest book addresses . . . women in their fifties and sixties who suddenly find themselves dating again. As with its predecessor, there is no shortage of catchphrase-worthy sentiments.” —Entertainment Weekly
“What comes after cosmos and toxic bachelors? Fuelled by chilled rosé, Sex and the City scribe Candace Bushnell is masterfully decoding a new era of single life.” —USA Today
“Bittersweet, amusing, and well observed.” —Guardian