Winter depression had set in and I was making my way through men at an energetic rate when I picked up Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City back in November. I was quickly hooked. Originally published as columns in The New York Observer between 1994 and 1996, it’s easily one of the funniest books I read this year, but, as is often true of the funniest books (and people), it’s also profound. Speaking with friends, I compared it to Jean Rhys, Chris Kraus, Ursula Parrot and more besides.
Sex and the City opens as you might expect. The first chapter – titled “My Unsentimental Education: Love in Manhattan? I Don’t Think So…” – begins with a “Valentine’s Day tale” from our unnamed narrator. A female journalist recently transplanted from England to New York meets a “typically eligible bachelor” (42, investment banker, salary of about $5 million a year). They have an intense two-week fling that hints at a future together; he even drives her to the Hamptons to show her the house he’s building. The following Tuesday, he rainchecks on dinner. She checks in two weeks later; he says he’ll call later in the week. And then, of course, she never hears from him again – an early iteration of what would now be termed ghosting. Or, as the narrator summarises, in a pre-echo of Carrie’s endearingly trite, much-memed “I couldn’t help but wonder” voiceovers in the show: “No one’s told her about the End of Love in Manhattan… Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence… No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember – instead, we have breakfast at 7am and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible”.
Tone seemingly set, we’re launched into Bushnell’s ’90s New York, the contours of which will be familiar to viewers of the show (although here the drug use is more realistic and everything is a little rougher around the edges). Chic settings – in the first few pages alone we get Francis Ford Coppola’s table at the Bowery Bar, Coco Pazzo restaurant, a charity benefit at the Four Seasons and the Karl Lagerfeld dinner – are peopled by a cast of sophisticated types easily definable by their career – actor, novelist, editor, entertainment lawyer – or with the kind of name that is its own introduction: Donovan Leitch, Capote Duncan, Skipper Johnson.
Quickly the book takes on a form that is part ethnographic study, part oral history. Our narrator pays a visit to La Trapeze, a couples-only sex club managed by Bob, “a burly, bearded man in a plaid shirt and jeans who looked like he should have been managing a Pets ’R’ Us store in Vermont”, which features a hot and cold buffet with the sign: “YOU MUST HAVE YOUR LOWER TORSO COVERED TO EAT”. Seven women gather together to discuss their common ex, Peri, “one of the city’s most accomplished serial daters, engaging in up to 12 ‘relationships’ a year” – relationships which always end in him being dumped. There is a chapter on never-married women and toxic bachelors, “better alone than badly accompanied”, and “modelizers” (men who are obsessed with dating models) weigh in on how they do it: “It’s like being around dogs; you’ve got to show no fear.”
Although some of the anecdotes are by now a little dated (though many aren’t), by combining the narrator’s theories and excursions with a cacophony of other perspectives, Bushnell is able to simulate one of the great joys and comforts of dating and casual sex, especially as we get older: the debrief with friends. Whether that’s a run through of a weird old time, or crowdsourcing opinions on what the wording of a text really means, the great spectrum of incoherent human behaviour and the unruly nature of desire tends to generate plenty of material to parse over dinner.
Aside from a brief appearance early on, we don’t properly meet Carrie until about a fifth of the way into the book, when she’s introduced as “my friend Carrie, a journalist in her mid-thirties”. She has convened with a group of women over tea at the Mayfair Hotel, and, inspired by “a 40-ish movie producer I’ll call Samantha Jones”, their talk turns to whether it’s possible to have sex “like a man”, “to give up on love and throttle up on power”. They run through topics which will feel relevant to women with even an average sex drive in today’s dating landscape: whether sex can be had without feelings entering into the equation; whether a litany of romantic disappointments can wholly desensitise a person; and, perhaps most resonantly, why it’s so difficult to find men who will agree to having no-strings-attached sex. “The repulsion starts when they begin wanting you to treat them as people, instead of sex toys,” says one woman of a poet who is terrific in bed but who stopped calling when she refused to let him read her his poetry.
Declaring that she is immune to falling in love, Carrie – already a distinctly different figure to the Carrie of the show – decides that she is going to become “a real bitch”. She goes to see the film The Last Seduction, about a woman who “uses and abuses every man she meets”, gets all her hair cut off, and, at a Sunday evening cocktail party thrown by Joop, she strides over to introduce herself to a man who, “looks like a younger, better-looking Ron Perlman”: Mr Big. (Big fans will be relieved that one of his signature show phrases, “Abso-fucking-lutely”, originates in the book. Book Big also answers the phone by saying, “Yo, yo. What up.”) From the start it’s clear that there is something between Mr Big and Carrie – other men are newly alert to her for one. When she meets him again a couple of nights later they end up back at his, and though she tries to leave at 4am, he gives her a T-shirt and boxer shorts and tells her to stay: “His bed was so comfortable. It was the most comfortable bed she’d ever been in in her life.”
From around here, a split occurs. We still have our unnamed narrator but, as the book goes on, Carrie becomes an increasingly central character. So central that, by its close, Sex and the City comes to read more as a third person account of Carrie’s life than a first person one of the narrator’s. The narrator continues in her merry dissection of New York’s dating landscape – including trysts with a model called “The Bone” and analysis of types like the Bicycle Boy – but, parallel to this, Carrie embarks on a relationship with Mr Big (though not one characterised by the same yearning as the one in the show) and parses age-old topics for women in their thirties. Namely: the question of whether or not to get married and have kids.
Take one episode in which four women, Carrie included, are summoned to a bridal shower at the suburban Greenwich home of their old friend Jolie Bernard, formerly a music agent, now a mother of two married to an investment banker. It goes predictably enough; two women try to get off the train when they find out there might not be alcohol at the shower. Sure enough, they are served Virgin Marys, and, as Carrie later summarises to Mr Big, “All they talked about was babies and private schools and how this friend of theirs got blackballed from the country club.”
Things get interesting in the aftermath: “Babes Flee Land of Wives for Night of Topless Fun”. (One great hangover of the book having originally been newspaper columns is these chapter titles, which tend to riff on the wordplay and sensationalism of the best tabloid headlines.) Miranda plans to work (“That was the great thing about not being married, not having kids, being alone. You could work on Sunday”), but instead stays out late at a party and has unprotected sex with a random man in a closet. Sarah breaks her ankle while drunkenly rollerblading in her basement at 4am with a 25-year-old she is dating: “Thirty-eight-years old. A grown woman clinging to the role of ingénue. Is there anything less attractive?” Carrie ends up at a strip joint in TriBeCa with Samantha, and there plays out a scene that wouldn’t be out of place in a Pier Paolo Pasolini film:
The bathroom had a grey wooden door that wouldn’t shut properly, and broken tiles. She thought about Greenwich. Marriage. Kids. “I’m not ready,” she thought. She went upstairs, and she took her clothes off and got up on the stage and started to dance. Samantha was staring at her, laughing, but by the time the bartender came over and politely told her to get down, Samantha wasn’t laughing anymore.
This all occurs over the span of about six pages, but it is one of the better portrayals I have read of the deep ambivalence and panic that many women feel around an inescapable choice. (For men, there is always the option of finding someone 20 years younger.) Added to this, Bushnell captures a split between urban and regional life that’s probably more acute today than it was in the ’90s: between those who decamp to the suburbs to have 2.5 children, and their major city peers, whose lives often look the same in their mid-thirties and forties as they did in their mid-twenties. Is one dull and settled, and the other a Peter Pan existence? This question is left unresolved. As our narrator wonders of Sarah’s broken ankle: “Is this better or worse than being married and living in the suburbs? Better or worse? Who can tell.”
Then finally – and, for me, these are the most moving parts of the book – there is Carrie and Mr Big’s relationship. After a brief honeymoon period, their dynamic settles into a stage that most people with at least one major long-term relationship under their belt will recognise – of comfort, of habit, of ennui. Conversations get circular, and sad. They spend a depressing weekend in the Hamptons; spring hasn’t set in properly yet, so they rent movies: “Mr. Big would only watch action movies. Carrie used to watch them with him, but now she didn’t want to watch them anymore.” Questions around the future, around what they both might want, around whether they are right for each other, seem to hang there – not easily answerable, but not avoidable forever. Carrie has unsettling dreams: about having a baby together, about Mr Big cheating. At the start they used to say they would move out West and live on a ranch one day. Near the book’s end, Carrie tells Mr Big she is writing a story. “Remember how we said that someday we’d move to Colorado and raise horses and shit? That’s what I’m writing about.” “Oh,” says Mr Big. “It’s a beautiful story.”
If the show was characterised in part by the “will they/won’t they” of Carrie and Big’s relationship, as I kept reading the book, I found myself instead wondering: will they keep going? And why?
