Is There Still Sex in the City? by Candace Bushnell, review: It’s disconcerting that this former sexpert sounds so out of touch

Candace Bushnell rose to fame in the Nineties as the glamorous “it girl” chronicling her life as a thirty-something single woman in Manhattan for The New York Observer. Her column spawned a book, two films and the hit HBO series Sex and the City, which came to define an era where the cultural discourse around women’s issues underwent a drastic shift.

Two decades later, a fifty-something Bushnell is back with a new book, in which she recovers from her mother’s death and her divorce to a ballet dancer by embarking on a mission to discover whether there still is sex in the city? After a brief (at least the book doesn’t dwell on it too much) stint in the countryside, she returns to New York to find a world of Tinder, “cubs” and MAM (middle-aged madness).

Bushnell is not a great writer – this much was clear from her columns. What she did possess was a sharp wit, and the kind of honesty about her personal life that managed to engage multiple generations of women. In Is There Still Sex in the City?, she lacks even that; the book flits between vague anecdotes about her friends to brief experiments with online dating. It also features plenty of moments that remind you how Carrie Bradshaw’s spending habits were one of the most unappealing traits about her character.

The main problem is that Bushnell still writes with the conviction that men are from Mars and women are from Venus – as though the opposite sex are an alien species, and young people equally so. It’s a poisonous trope that should have died in the Nineties, along with many others that Bushnell perpetuates, such as the notion that a woman is not “complete” if she is not married and with children. Throughout the book, which has been billed as a novel by Bushnell but a “memoir” by her publicist, you hope she will reach the conclusion that being single is not the worst thing in the world. She doesn’t.

It’s disconcerting that a woman who was once regarded as a kind of guru to women’s sex lives should sound so out of touch. She talks about women having relationships with younger men like it’s a new trend, and every other chapter she coins a different initialism or phrase: “Cubs” or “cubbing” is dating younger men; “MAM” is middle-aged madness, “MNB” (My new boyfriend) is the apparent phenomenon of an older woman finding a new partner. Each time Bushnell comes up with a new term, you hear the Mean Girls character Gretchen Wieners in your head, desperately trying to make “fetch” happen.

Other characters are thinly drawn and so you care little for them, asides from when Bushnell sounds alarmingly casual about a friend who clearly has a drinking problem (she blames it on MAM). In another unsettling account, Bushnell first speculates that a close friend took her own life after coming off her medication, before making the rather appalling jump to suggest it has something to do with the fear that accompanies all childless, single women of a certain age.

Perhaps the reason this new book fails to translate is because Bushnell seems so anxious to remain relatable, hence her rounding up groups of young women to hear about their Tinder experiences, and attempting to invent so much ridiculous new slang. The only real jaw-dropping moment is when she blows $4,000 on a face treatment, despite supposedly being strapped for cash. She points out a friend is in the privileged “1 per cent”. Not her, though. No, she claims to be broke after divorce but can somehow still afford a country house plus a pied-a-terre on the Upper East Side.

There is plenty of room for books that explore the lives of single, divorced and married middle-aged women. But Bushnell’s presents her as a woman who wants to be in with the twenty-somethings as much as the ones suffering from so-called MAM. By the end, you can’t help but wonder whether she’s the right person to represent either.

‘Is There Still Sex in the City?’ by Candace Bushnell is published by Little Brown, £16.99