Two-plus decades after Carrie Bradshaw & Co. became avatars of modern singledom, pop culture has inevitably evolved — though it’s not clear, in Bushnell’s latest, that the woman who created them has ... At 60, Bushnell’s voice still has the cigarette-tipped kittenishness of a sort of graying Holly Golightly ... for every welcome moment of vulnerability — she addresses with unvarnished honesty all the ways that society tends to erase a woman over 50 without a partner — there are odd digressions that feel dragged too soon from the drafts folder: meandering thoughts on five-figure face creams, errant houseguests, and, perhaps inevitably, shopping for shoes. She dispenses with the end of her decade-long marriage in approximately a paragraph, which is less space than she allots to the death of her dog, and delivers tales of close friends’ misadventures as if they were cocktail-party anecdotes, not the genuine crises they often honestly seem to be. By the time she gets to her own cautiously optimistic ending, even a faithful reader couldn’t help but wonder: Isn’t there more to sex than this City?
Bushnell’s voice is as knowing and sharp as ever ... As usual, female bonds are a godsend, but also the book’s weakness, as Bushnell toggles fitfully between her own story and those of many friends, and even friends of friends — most of whom are so lightly sketched that it’s hard to care about them. Nor is it easy to relate to some of their problems ... more ruminative than the original; winding through the amusing anecdotes is a vivid current of fear ... This dread of irrelevance is worth exploring in greater depth. Instead, she backs away and pivots to a story — a plodding 17-page story — about being hoodwinked into buying $4,000 face cream. It’s a missed opportunity, one of several in the book.
[The] you-gotta-laugh-or-you-cry place is where Candace Bushnell, with her usual sparkling candor, begins Is There Still Sex in the City? ... It’s not easy to recreate the magic formula of an epoch-defining best seller. Bushnell gives it her best shot, sprinkling her trademark acronyms and nicknames like comedy confetti ... She is funny on 'cubbing' ... and on 'MAM' (middle-aged madness, which Bushnell claims is the female version of the male midlife crisis). Any woman in that age bracket, however, will recognize the thunderous mood-swings as symptoms of that state the author is so weirdly reluctant to mention ... At the end, there is tragedy for one of the women in the Village group. But we have hardly learned their names, let alone their characters, so the emotional impact is dulled. Bushnell, who is better at hilarious than heartfelt, has found happiness ... As for the answer to the book’s title, there isn’t a whole lot of sex in the city, but there is companionship, which would have appalled Carrie Bradshaw — but what did she and her shoe collection know?
In this amiable if slightly unfocused follow-up to Sex and the City, the iconic 1990s bible for single-girl life in Manhattan, we check in with Bushnell as she closes out her 50s ... As Bushnell paints a picture of how women navigate aging, she can lapse into overgeneralized and sometimes contradictory statements. Her friends are all hormonal victims of what she calls middle-age madness, or MAM, fighting with each other and drinking too much. Yet they also are suddenly finding themselves 'catnip for younger men.' ... But the effervescent Bushnell still has the ability to make readers laugh with her casually dry one-liners ... One can’t help but root for her.
This book is not quite what it seems. And that turns out to be a pleasant surprise. It’s Candace Bushnell’s meditation on what happens when life takes a wrong turn for her and her group of girlfriends. It’s bittersweet, amusing and well observed. It starts out being about sex and dating but really it’s about disappointment, regret and self-acceptance ... You get the impression that Bushnell would have been happy writing this as a memoir in the vein of Nora Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck. But, instead, it is marketed as being about 'cubs' (attractive young men) and 'cougars' (attractive older women). It isn’t really ... The moments when it takes off are when we feel as if we’re getting close to who Bushnell really is: the woman who says she will do anything for a man but whose friends always come first, who can get ripped off by a beautician to the tune of $4,000 and who does not walk out on a date when a man stands in front of his bed and says: 'I’ve had a lot of great sex on that bed. And I hope to have a lot more in the future.' That is a flawed and potentially interesting woman. If you can look past the MAM (Mid-Aged Madness) and MNBs (My New Boyfriends), it’s fun getting to know her.
... a collection of commentaries and recounted hijinks (and lojinks) close in spirit to the original ... Sometimes funny, sometimes silly, sometimes quite sad—i.e., an accurate portrait of life in one's 50s.
...it would be a mistake to dismiss this book as romantic fluff. Bushnell’s style may be arch and breezy, but many of the characters deal with disappointment, heartbreak, and perhaps just as lethally, resignation ... From Cosmos to rosé, her current beverage of choice, Bushnell may drink pink. But she knows how to write dark.
