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Picture the scene on Manhattan's Upper East Side, when you arrive at a "Baby Buggy Luncheon." It is peopled with young women with "brunette locks, gleaming like espresso beans" or "flat blond hair, a few perfectly located post-laser freckles and sky-blue eyes."
These are the billionaire mommies "whose messiah is Jessica Seinfeld in a wardrobe of Narciso Rodriguez dresses." They have everything except, perhaps a husband, because he is now surplus to requirements. (Significantly, the only book a yummy mommy reads is Maureen Dowd's "Are Men Necessary?")
In her second book after her best-selling "Bergdorf Blondes," the British-born Plum Sykes has invented a new version of the "chick lit" that offers as many brand names as orgasms. Let's call "The Debutante Divorcee" (Miramax Books) "chic lit." For Sykes, with her Oxford University education and her career at American Vogue, has a skillful way of biting but only playfully the hand that feeds her green salad (no dressing).
She has written a wicked satire on the women whose delicately reshaped noses are tucked into her monthly glossy. Yet, with her ironed flat hair and breathy, disingenuous comments, she also resembles them. And she captures with witty exactness the nuances of a shopper who pays $40 for a piece of French cheese and calls it "daylight robbery" (but, of course, a bargain compared to her chinchilla snow boots). "I see it as comedy and parody I think of satire as a vicious political attitude," said Sykes, in London last week for a book launch at the classy nightspot Annabel's, where Pucci sponsored the party and dressed the author, her stomach as flat as a washboard, despite her pregnancy. ("You know how it is you're best friends in five minutes flat because you're both wearing Pucci bikinis," she writes on page two.) Sykes researched her book by interviewing 20 new divorcees and discovered that most tend to "party like Edie Sedgwick or Lindsay Lohan." The sad-eyed, properly attired kids she occasionally glimpsed were written out.
American and British life cannot be compared, not just because of the money ("American life is more like Versailles") but because American society is porous enough to let in an upwardly mobile Sean Combs. It also made Nicole Kidman and Uma Thurman into "it" girl divorcees. The next book? Sykes is not telling, but considering her condition, she could expand her expose of the "socialite baby" more familiar with flashbulbs than formula and wearing "$750 cashmere bootie-and-cap sets aimed at a six-week demographic."
(C) 2006 International Herald Tribune. via ProQuest Information and Learning Company; All Rights Reserved
