“I’ll be the first person in line to see the Sex and the City movie,” Imogen Lloyd Webber confessed when we met a while back. “Carrie Bradshaw was a beautiful fantasy, but she was a fantasy, and you have to appreciate reality first.” Thus The Single Girl’s Survival Guide, a book which tries to speak more directly to the independent lives that Lloyd Webber and her girlfriends were living, by teaching women how to manage everything else—job, family, friends—and get happy about their lives before even thinking about men. We met a few weeks after a Gawker correspondent had attended her book party and commented that “she smells like when you floss your teeth.” She laughed the reference off easily. “It’s not something to be offended by… I enjoyed the attention and it was tremendously gratifying that they came,” she insisted. “There are things in life to get upset about. Bad press is not one of them.” (And, actually, it wasn’t even that bad; he meant it in a nice way, after all!)*
“What’s happened to this book in the last few months has blown my mind,” she said of the attention she’d been receiving—and, based on the press mentions in her blog, has continued to receive since we met—and she was definitely going to write another one, although she wasn’t sure yet whether it was going to be fiction or nonfiction. In the meantime, she said, she was “very much single, very much on the market,” but not that much, she quickly reversed herself: “I don’t want a boy at the moment. And my publishers would freak.”
*And I’m going to miss write-ups like that after next week, along with the other major blows to Gawker‘s talent roster.