If, to go by think pieces and surveys of
millennials, America is in the midst of a sex
recession, where does that leave our most intimate
desires—the ones W. H. Auden described “as crooked as
corkscrews”? Nowhere near straightened out, as Lisa
Taddeo illustrates in her potent and provocative work
of narrative nonfiction, ThreeWomen (Avid Reader
Press). The result of eight years of reporting, Taddeo’s
book braids together the accounts of a trio of American
women who were willing to give the author untrammeled
access to their intimate thoughts. Although the book has
a clear objective—to examine the private lives of modern
women—Taddeo does not muscle her three narratives into
the service of a single thesis. Bit by bit, she shades in the
women’s emotional and family histories, illuminating how
deprivations of the past can mutate into new hungers.
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? (Grove Press). The protagonist, Candace,
is a recently divorced writer who trades her Manhattan
life for a cottage in the Hamptons. The loosely assembled
chronicle of her midlife dating and mating is brimming with
the snappy rhetorical questions and taxonomic acronyms
that became Bushnell’s signature back in the stiletto days
(“MNBs” are My New Boyfriends; “MAM” is the
Middle-Aged Madness that awaits every former party girl).
While Carrie was a bright-eyed anthropologist, Candace
and her friends are survivalists; even beyond the City, it’s a
jungle out there. —lau r en mechling
Two new books talk about sex, baby.
Mating Games
BEHIND THE LOOK
Fine Feather
LOVE STORIES
SARAH JESSICA
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