(Director Cindy Chupack won an Emmy
for her work on Sex and the City.) But
Arquette really lights up when she talks
about something apart from her role
as a mom—her work pushing for the
Equal Rights Amendment. And that’s
the problem with the film: we already
know these three mom archetypes too
well. This is in contrast to Gloria Bell,
released earlier this year and starring
Julianne Moore, which gets at the com-
plexities of existing in the in-between
of young and old, a parent but not so
needed, attractive but with sexual irrel-
evance in view.
Otherhood was also overshadowed
by news of Huffman’s bout of real-life
middle-aged madness, when she admit-
ted to paying $15,000 to get her daugh-
ter into college with faked achievements.
The irony is that the real-life story might
be a more powerful tale about mothers
who need to separate from their chil-
dren. It made us cringe, in part because
we’ve all done things—albeit less egre-
gious things—to help our kids, only to
realize later we’d gone too far. It can be
easier to see truth in extremes.
I welcome Bushnell’s new series, so
long as it’s brave enough to take us to
those outer edges of female longing, in-
security, vanity, brilliance and connec-
tion. That was, after all, the beauty of
the original. The SATC women were not
subtle creatures. Most of us don’t have
600 pairs of shoes, nor have we left a
man at the altar, but we viscerally un-
derstood Carrie’s self-destructive obses-
sion with both the shoes and the man.
And while it’s common for us to choose
one of the four characters as our avatar,
in many ways we are all of them at once.
The challenge for the new incarna-
tion is to be as open and complex about
post-menopausal life as the last one was
about everything that comes before.
Bushnell and her co-creators would
do well to take a page from Season 2 of
BBC’s Fleabag, which features a now
Emmy-nominated guest spot from Kris-
tin Scott Thomas. Her character gives a
raw and riveting soliloquy about female
aging and the liberation that comes with
it. Afterward, young Fleabag, on the re-
ceiving end, says she’d been told meno-
pause was horrendous. Thomas answers
with a wink: “It is horrendous. But then
it’s magnificent.”
through India, Sicily and Tanzania
while inspecting her own issues
with commitment, health and
spirituality. The goal: to come out
of her self-prescribed “man fast”
more grounded and independent.
Spoiler alert: she finds fulfillment
sans partnership.
Artist and comedian Shelby
Lorman, meanwhile, wants us
to think—and laugh—about the
norms of dating and masculinity.
Awards for Good Boys is a series
of cartoons, doodles and written
interludes poking fun at things we
laud men for even in 2019. (He
took out the trash? Marry him,
he’s a catch!) The book is a rueful
sigh, less instruction manual than
recalibration of standards for male
behavior.
Speaking of which: Inti Chavez
Perez’s Respect is, unlike the
other books here, geared toward
male readers—more specifically,
teenage ones. Covering everything
from anatomy to consent, it fills a
gap in the literature for young men
navigating adolescence in an era
that may seem like a minefield of
potential missteps. It is to pickup-
artist manuals like The Game what
the above books are to The Rules:
a rejection of the tired narrative
of the conquest and a new way of
thinking about what it means to
have the best of everything—with
or without a partner.
“You just want the best of
everything, don’t you?” my date
asked—nay, accused—as I nursed
a Negroni and balked. Don’t we
all? As a millennial woman, I’ve
been groomed to never settle. It’s
implicit in the girl-power rhetoric
of our pop-culture icons and
explicit on social media. Previous
generations studied The Rules
for landing “Mr. Right” (recall #2:
Don’t talk to a man first). But a
new set of books suggest we set
aside the question of Mr.—or
Ms.—Right and strive for a more
empowered relationship with
ourselves, prospective partners
and love itself.
For The Game of Desire, a new
self-help dating guide from Shan
Boodram, the sexologist enlisted
five women for a romance boot
camp, designed to teach them to
flirt better, identify matches and
communicate with purpose. Some
of her suggestions (stroke the rim
of your glass to arouse your date’s
desire) might raise eyebrows. And
they’re delivered with a chummy
vibe that can grate. But the bulk
of her advice is sound: learn
what you want and create the
circumstances to get it.
Man Fast, a new memoir
from former aid worker Natasha
Scripture, is less about dating than
about how much a step back from
it can do. Following the Eat, Pray,
Love outline, Scripture travels
New dating manuals
leave the rules behind
By Raisa Bruner
NE
TFL
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