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On a recent afternoon, Candace
Bushnell and I were sitting at the
poolside bar of the Beverly Hills
Hotel. It had been 25 years since
she had submitted her first “Sex
and the City” column to the New
York Observer, the weekly broad-
sheet where I was an editor. In that
quarter century, during which Can-
dace and I remained close friends,
the column became a book, which
became the wildly popular HBO se-
ries (running from 1998 to 2004 and
winning several Emmys for its
stars), which was followed by two
movies, “Sex and the City” in 2008
(worldwide box office $415 million)
and “Sex and the City 2” in 2010
($294 million).
Candace was wearing a gray
pinstriped, men’s-style vintage Tu-
leh jacket, flowered linen shirt,
white silk trousers and leather
Gucci slippers lined with lamb-
swool. She ordered scrambled eggs
and a pink Frosé cocktail. Tan,
whippet-thin and preternaturally
optimistic, Candace swivels be-
tween impish and WASPish — the
“New England stiff upper lip” she
was raised with in Connecticut
sharing time with the crooked
smile that made her a Meg Ryan
doppelgänger and It-Girl of demi-
monde Manhattan in the 1990s.
This summer, Grove Press pub-
lished Candace’s most recent book,
her eighth, “Is There Still Sex in the
City?” part memoir, part dating
guide for women over 50. Candace
is developing the book into a TV se-
ries with Paramount Television
and Anonymous Content; she is
cowriting the pilot and will serve as
executive producer. If she was a
sensation in her 30s, Candace has
become a franchise at 60.
“When I first got the column, the
first thing I thought was, ‘This will
be my big break,’” she said of her 34-
year-old self. “I felt like I had been
practicing for that moment for
years. And when something like
that happens to a woman, people
tend to think, ‘Oh, it’s a random
thing, and you just kind of got
lucky.’ No. I’d been working profes-
sionally in journalism since I was 19.
And one of the continual frustra-
tions of being me at that time was
the incredible sexism. Those were
real #MeToo times. I find out now
there are men out there who ac-
tively tried to sabotage my career.
One even told me so. That’s one of
the things that I really remember, is
how the men behaved, and how as a
woman you had to negotiate all of
this. You’re trying to make a living
against a backdrop where the nego-
tiations are not straightforward.
They’re always muddied by sex-
ism.”
Candace’s initial title for her
new book had been “Middle-Aged
Madness.” In 2011 her husband, for-
mer New York City Ballet principal
ballet dancer Charles Askegard,
asked her for a divorce. (They had
married in 2002, in a union chroni-
cled in the “Vows” column of the
New York Times.) “I felt like the sys-
tem had defeated me,” she writes in
the book. “Not only could I lose my
home but I was about to become
one more of the millions of middle-
aged women who would get di-
vorced that year. Who would have
to get back out there, to once again
look for a man who doesn’t exist.”
Candace wrote most of the book
in her home in Sag Harbor, Long Is-
land. (She also has an apartment
on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.)
Over those two years, her father
died and her best friend, publicist
Jeanine Pepler, committed suicide.
During that time she also started
dating Jim Coleman, a tall and
strapping real estate advisor whom
she met the old-fashioned way, at a
party, and to whom she dedicates
her new book. They were intro-
duced by Chris Noth, the actor who
played Mr. Big on “Sex and the
City.”
“We live in a time when it seems
like people have to keep starting
over and over again,” Candace said.
“The reality is that there are losses.
It’s also a time when people feel like,
‘It’s now or never to change my life.’
In your 50s, you start to run out ofsteam. You’ve been doing every-
thing and going so hard, and you
get numb, because you’ve got this
routine and you’re doing it over and
over again. But then these losses
hit you; there’s divorce, death. They
make you sad and they do change
your idea of who you are in the
world. They can set off a bout of
middle-aged madness, where the
core of it is, you’re trying to figure
out what to do to feel better about
your life.
“One of the things that also hap-
pens to people is feeling like you are
12 again,” she continued. “Women
aren’t menopausal forever. Accord-
ing to research I’ve done, you tech-
nically can only be menopausal for
one year. And then you’re post-
menopausal.
“Some women have said — and I
had this experience too, when the
hormones kind of go all of a sudden
— you feel like you’re 12 again, the
way you felt before you even had
any damn hormones! Now I know itsounds kind of kooky. People do go
a little bit crazy — like there’s a de-
sire for running, a desire for danc-
ing, for movement. The person may
start hanging out with people who
are much younger.
“If somebody is in the middle of
this middle-aged madness — for in-
stance, they’re dancing or they’re
drinking too much and they’re be-
having in a way that’s not them-
selves — don’t try to stop them, be-
cause they also could be very angry,
and they will no doubt yell at you.”
If “Sex and the City” served as a
blissfully unreliable narrator for
women in their 20s and 30s, Bush-
nell’s gimlet eye has swiveled
toward women in their 50s and 60s
who are grappling with a “hazy fu-
ture.”
“You end up getting divorced
and you haven’t been in the job
market in a serious way for 20 years.
You have no income and you’re try-
ing to get a job you had 30 years
ago,” she said. “It’s really a feeling,‘Well, I came full circle.’ It’s not the
fairy tale ending that women are
promised.
“What’s interesting is that
doesn’t seem to really matter, what
choices you’ve made,” she contin-
ued. “Although what ends up mat-
tering the most is not love but mon-
ey. And, you know, that’s very, very
harsh.”
Candace said she loves what
she’s seeing in the work of younger
women writers. “I’m very im-
pressed,” she said. “I think women
writers right now are really at the
forefront. There is a serious level of
thinking and analysis that women
weren’t really allowed to do when I
was in my 20s. I look at all these
young women — many of them
seem to have gone to Ivy League
schools and had quite a bit of edu-
cation. They’re not off-the-cuff,
cowboy researchers like me.”
She took a sip of her pink drink
and laughed. “That’s an edible
flower,” she said.LIFE, ETC.
‘Sex’ guru
bounces back
Candace Bushnell’s latest reckons
with loss, divorce and middle age
CANDACEBushnell, after divorce and starting over, has written “Is There Still Sex in the City?”Jay L. ClendeninLos Angeles TimesBy Peter M. Stevenson
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