Candace Bushnell can spot a wedding ring faster than a group of women at their 10year school reunion. "You're married," she says, shortly after we meet. "Kids?" This is asked in a slightly combative tone and that's only the start of it. There's a lot of talk about marriage when you're with the American author, which is odd given that her first book, Sex in the City, and now her new book, 4 Blondes, aren't exactly cosy aga sagas. But then, despite the athletic sex, the recreational drugs and the designer wardrobes that are everywhere in her books, the lives of her women characters are defined by men.
"Every woman wants to get married, right?"
Bushnell has a way of asking a question that suggests it would be unwise to contradict her.
"No," I say. "I don't think so. Some do, some don't. Some women have other priorities."
Bushnell is 42 and single and says her New York experience of thirtysomething women in desperate search of a marriageable man is the same the world over.
"I mean, there are more women in Dublin than men, right?"
"Yes," I reply. "But it's the opposite down the country." She seems unconvinced.
While her new book has spent months in the bestseller lists in the US, she is known on this side of the Atlantic because of the TV series, Sex in the City, which is shown on TV3 and Channel 4. Although the Irish station used it last year in its advertising campaign, the show's low ratings kept it out of the top 10. The funny and wickedly observational series has a cult following. It is based on Bushnell's first novel, which grew out of a weekly column she wrote in the mid-1990s for the New York Observer.
The show has four central female characters, one of whom, Carrie Bradshaw, is based on Bushnell's own life as a freelance journalist in New York in the 1980s and 1990s. The four friends brunch a lot, drink endless Cosmopolitans and at least one of them manages to bed the guy before the end of each episode. They hardly ever seem to work but they have great jobs, fantastic apartments and cool clothes.
Candace Bushnell isn't an enormous fan of the show, which is now in its third series. "The first two series were fairly close to the book, but the latest one isn't," she says, sipping a Chardonnay.
"The book is darker." She has never had any involvement with the series and says that now it is written by "two gay guys and two really unglamorous women".
"Does that matter?"
"Hell yes, the characters are very different. Samantha is more like a gay man than a women. Look at her obsession with male body parts, women just aren't like that."
Bushnell herself is very glamorous. Her lizard-print leather trousers are toned down a little by a beige two-piece but she still exudes the sort of urban chic that looks out-of-place in the starched environment of the Shelbourne Hotel diningroom. She should really be perched on a white leather couch in the Morrison Hotel or at the very least in the Octagon bar in the Clarence. And she's loud with a "Nu Yoik" twang that ricochets around the room.
Originally from Connecticut, she moved to New York to become an actress but studied journalism at New York University. She was a magazine journalist until six years ago and now divides her time between London, where her English boyfriend lives, New York, where she lives on the upper east side, and a small house in up-state New York.
While the four women in Sex in the City are self-obsessed, they are likeable and funny. The four blondes in her new book are most certainly not. Each of their stories is told separately and they don't overlap. There's Janey Wilcox, a beautiful B-list model who every spring hunts out a wealthy man and hooks up with him just so she can get out of New York and spend her summer in the Hamptons.
Winnie Dieke is one half of a highpowered serious journalist couple whose bitter unhappiness stems from her husband's lack of career success. The third story is about Cecelia, a beautiful society type who marries a trophy husband but records her descent into paranoia in her journal. The fourth blonde is a smart and sassy journalist who goes to London to write a story on the sex lives of British singletons. Just like much of Sex in the City, this story is autobiographical but its tone and style are very different from the three others, which makes it seem out of place in the book.
Bushnell says it is only there because her publisher made her put it in. The men in 4 Blondes are, with few exceptions, either abusive sadists or simply weak.
I suggest the characters in 4 Blondes are irredeemable.
"That is so judgmental," she says. "If you have problems with the characters, that says more about you than anything." Still bristling, she agrees the characters are unlikeable. "I think they are horrible. Janey is basically a prostitute," she says, before launching - with ever increasing volume - into her theory about the compromises women make. It ends with a high decibel tirade.
"I mean, who bought your house? Your husband did, right?"
Two tables across from us, a man virtually gets whiplash as he looks around at us. "Your husband earns more than you, . right?" He does. "Right," she says, and I can't quite figure out how we moved from a prostitute character in a book to such a bizarrely outdated opinion on the economic dynamics of modern marriage.
HER new book has been packaged to fit into the popular sex 'n' shopping fiction category. It's an uneasy fit because there's always a light, feel-good factor in that type of popular fiction and there certainly isn't in this book.
"I don't write pap," she says. "I could have written that sort of book but I wanted to write something darker."
Three of the four stories have been sold. The first two to HBO, the US TV channel which makes Sex in the City, the third to Universal, for whom she is writing a screenplay. The fourth story ends with the promise of a sequel.
Her publicity tour included her appearance on the Late Late Show last week. As we parted she said she was thinking of wearing red leather trousers and a Dolce & Gabbana top on the show.
"You'll have a great time," I tell her. "Pat Kenny will really like you."
"Really?" she says. "But he's married, right?"
There's that M word again.
4 Blondes by Candace Bushnell is published by Abacus, £6.99 in UK
The third series of Sex in the City starts on TV3 on Thursday, March 1st, at 10 p.m. The series is on Channel 4 on Wednesdays at 10 p.m.