Plum Sykes 2007. Some have seen Sykes' books as lying in natural succession to "Sex and the City", Candace Bushnell's column in the "New York Observer", which was the inspiration for a highly successful television series (HBO 1998–2004). Others remarked that the story was no less than the kind of offensive vapid claptrap you would expect from a dead-eyed rich girl. However, despite their satire, others have regarded them as too rooted in Sykes' own Park Avenue "set" to be reflective more generally of women's lives in post-9/11 Manhattan. Anita Loos' "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes" (1925) is perhaps a closer, if incomparable, antecedent.
Anita Loos a devoted admirer of H. L. Mencken and when he was in New York, she would take a break from her "Tuesday Widows" and join his circle, which included Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Joseph Hergesheimer, essayist Ernest Boyd and theater critic George Jean Nathan. Loos adored Mencken with what may have been love and preferred this group over the Round Table. She gradually realized Emerson paled in comparison to someone like Mencken, and disappointingly, high-IQ gentlemen didn't fall for women with brains, but those with more "downstairs". In 1925, on the train to Hollywood for another Talmadge picture,