The real Sex in the City

09 Jun 06 @ 08:04 PM  category » books

Bridget Harrison, ertswhile Brit reporter and Dating Columnist for the NYPost, friend, and sister of Smooth Harry, has just published her first book, Tabloid Love. The New York launch party was covered by Gawker, but sadly I was on a plane to France at the time and missed the shenanigans. The London launch party, shared with Giles Coren for his book Winkler (gotta love this man (a) for suggesting that there should be a "fat tax", to huge outcry in the UK and (b) for winning the Bad Sex Writing Award and creating a meme for the phrase "like Zorro"), was highly amusing. At one point I was chatting with a young journalist there about not recognising people you (supposedly) know. Any tale of mine paled by comparison to his, though, with his admission that at a party a week previously he'd been talking to a woman for about twenty minutes before she said to him, "You don't remember me, do you?". At which point, that dreadful thought goes through a man's mind, apparently, that perhaps he'd slept with her but didn't remember. Oh yes, oh yes, but much worse in this case - she was the girl he had lost his virginity to ten years previously! Ouch.

But I digress. B's book...I couldn't put it down, and read it in one long night. It's not laugh-out-loud funny, but oh so poignant and true a tale of love and betrayal in the big city. I cringed, I groaned, I recognised not only all the places and people, but the oh so bloody accurate account of the notoriously fickle and dreadful NY dating scene.

Candace Bushnell's cover quote was spot on: "A real-life Bridget Jones's Diary meets Sex and the City."

You go, B! I'm waiting to hear that the movie rights have been snapped up. I'm thinking Kate Winslet or Keira Knightley for the Bridget role.