HotmailNew novel follows adventures of single women
‘Sex and the City’ writer Liz Tuccillo makes her hilarious fiction debut
“Sex and the City” writer Liz Tuccillo makes her fiction debut with “How to Be Single,” a story about a group of single women on a quest to find the men of their dreams. An excerpt.
Rule one: Make sure you have friends
How Georgia is single
"I just want to have fun! Now that I'm single I just want to have fun! You single people are always having fun!! When are we going to go out and have fun?!!!"
She is screaming, screaming at me on the phone. "I want to kill myself, Julie. I don't want to live with this much pain. Really. I want to die. You have to make me feel like everything is going to be okay! You have to take me out and remind me that I'm young and alive and can have lots and lots of fun! Or god knows what I might do!!!" Dale, Georgia's husband, had left her for another woman two weeks ago and she was obviously a tad upset.
The call came at 8:45 in the morning. I was at the Starbucks on Forty-fourth and Eighth, balancing a cardboard tray of coffees in one hand, my cell phone and this conversation in the other, my hair in my face, grande mochaccinos tilting toward my left breast, all while paying the nice young twentysomething at the cash register. I'm a multitasker.
I had already been up for four hours. As a publicist for a large New York publishing house, part of my job is to cart our writers around from interview to interview as they promote their books. On this morning I was responsible for thirty-one-year-old writer Jennifer Baldwin. Her book, How to Keep Your Husband Attracted to You During Pregnancy, became an instant bestseller. Women all around the country couldn't buy the book fast enough. Because, of course, how to keep your husband attracted to you during your pregnancy should be the main concern for a woman during that very special time in her life. So this week we were making the prestigious morning show rounds. Today, The View, Regis and Kelly. WPIX, NBC, and CNN, so far that day, ate it up. How could you not love a segment showing eight-months-pregnant women how to strip for their men? Now the author, her personal publicist, her literary agent, and the agent's assistant were all anxiously waiting for me in the Town Car that was parked outside. I held the lifeline to their caffeine fix.
"Do you really feel like you want to kill yourself, Georgia? Because if you do, I'll call 911 right now and get an ambulance over there." I'd read somewhere that you should take all suicide talk seriously, even though I think all she was really doing was making sure I would take her out drinking.
"Forget the ambulance, Julie, you're the organizer, the one who makes things happen -- call those single friends of yours, the ones you are always having fun with -- and let's go out and have fun!"
As I continued my balancing act toward the car, I thought about how tired that thought made me. But I knew Georgia was going through a difficult period and it would probably get much worse before it got better.
It's a tale as old as time. Dale and Georgia had kids, stopped having regular sex, and began fighting. They became distant, and then Dale told Georgia he was in love with a twenty-seven-year-old whore gutter trash samba teacher, that he met at Equinox. Call me crazy, but I'm thinking hot sex might have had something to do with this. Also, and I don't want to be disloyal, and I would never even suggest Georgia was at fault in any way because Dale is an asshole, and we hate him now, but I can't resist saying, Georgia completely took Dale for granted.
Now, to be fair, I am particularly judgmental about the Married
Women Who Take Their Husbands for Granted Syndrome. When I see a very wet man hold an umbrella out to his wife after he has just walked five blocks to pick up the car and drive it back to the restaurant and she doesn't even say thank you, honestly, it makes me very cranky. So I noticed that Georgia took Dale for granted, particularly when she would talk to him in that tone. The tone that you can dress up and call what you want, but the truth is it's plain old-fashioned contempt. The tone is disgust. The tone is impatience. The tone is a vocal eye roll. It is the undeniable proof that marriage is a horribly flawed institution let out in a single "I told you, the popcorn popper is on the shelf over the refrigerator." If you were able to fly around the world, collecting the tone as it is let out of all the disgruntled married men's and women's mouths, cart it back to some desert in Nevada, and release it -- the earth would literally sink into itself, imploding in sheer global irritation.
Georgia talked to Dale in that tone. And of course that wasn't the only reason for their split. People are irritating and that's what marriage is: good days and bad days. And, really, what do I know? I'm thirty-eight years old and I have been single for six years. (Yes, I said six.) Not celibate, not out of commission, but definitely, fully, officially, here-goes-another-holiday-season-alone single. So in my imaginings, I would always treat my man right. I would never speak harshly to him. I would always let him know that he was desired and respected and my number one priority. And I would always look hot and I'd always be sweet, and if he asked, I would grow a long fishtail and gills and swim with him in the ocean topless.
So now Georgia has gone from semicontented wife and mother to a somewhat suicidal single mother with two children. And she wants to party.
Something must happen when you become single again. A self-preservation instinct must kick in that resembles having a complete lobotomy. Because Georgia suddenly has traveled back in time to when she was twenty-eight and now just wants to go out "to some bars, you know, to meet guys," forgetting that we are actually in our late thirties and some of us have been doing that without a break for years now. And frankly, I don't want to go out and meet guys. I don't want to spend an hour using one of the many hot appliances I own to straighten my hair so I can feel attractive enough to go out drinking. I want to go to bed early so I can get up early so I can make my smoothie and go out and run in the morning. I am a marathoner. Not in the literal sense; I run only three miles a day. But as a single person. I know how to pace myself. I am aware of how long a run it can be. Georgia, of course, wants to line up the babysitters and start sprinting.
"It's your obligation to have fun with me! I don't know any other single person except you! You have to go out with me. I want to go out with your single friends! You guys are always going out!! Now that I'm single, I want to go out too!!!"
She is also forgetting that she is the same woman who would always look at me with such pity when I would talk about my single life and exclaim in one breath "OhmyGodthat'ssosadIwanttodie."
But Georgia would do something that all my other happily married or coupled friends would never even think of doing: she would pick up the phone and organize a dinner party and scrounge up some single men for me to meet. Or she'd go to her pediatrician and ask if he knew any eligible bachelors. She was actively involved in my search for the Good Man, no matter how comfortable and self-satisfied she might have felt herself. And that is a rare and beautiful quality. And that is why on that Friday morning, as I was mopping up coffee from my white shirt, I agreed to call up three of my other single friends and see if they would go out and party with my newly single, slightly hysterical friend.
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