Okay, so this selection of Heimel’s essays were originally published in (according to the copyright page) Playboy Magazine, Cosmo, and the Village Voice¹. What, you are thinking, what? That’s like saying a priest, a astrophysicist, and a hedge fund manager walked into a bar – which, I am guessing, made you think of three men, which does not necessarily have to be true. Lots of women these days are priests, astrophysicists, and hedge fund managers. Not enough, but enough that you should not assume that the joke is about men.

This book is what Sex and the City² should have been: brilliant, humorous, sexy, empowering and feminist (in the best sense of the word). An urban woman’s reflections on being a woman, living in the city, dealing with life, men, other women, children, and assumptions that each of these things have about each other.

Here’s a passage from one of my favorite essays, PMS and Outfits:

The buying of unfortunately colored boots is the biggest symptom of PMS. I was having a business lunch with a perfectly awful girl once, the kind of girl who steals boyfriends. She was wearing neon-blue, leather cowboy boots. Snakeskin and suede insets. Scalloped tops. Tassels. Beige stacked heels. Excruciating. You could kill yourself just looking at them.

“What do you think of my boots?” she asked.

“When did you buy them?” I asked.

“Last week some time,” she said.

“When was your last period?” I asked.

“It just started today,” she said. “Why?”

“No reason,” I said. “The boots are extremely pleasant.”

“You don’t think they’re a little busy or something? I’m having doubts.”

“On the contrary, I think your boots are very stylish and delightful,” I said, remembering how she tried to give Rita’s boyfriend a blow job at a party once.

And this is not even the best part of that essay.

Heimil’s essays often recreate conversations with her friends, or from dinner parties she attended, and even once, with her teenaged son about sex. The book is split into four groups: The Times; Women; Men; Women and Men; and The Writer’s Life.

Here’s another passage from Highway 1967 Revisited in The Writer’s Life section. Just prior to this passage, she is talking about her teenaged son and his friend’s obsession with Jimi Hendrix:

I know what these kids pine for. They want the feeling that we had back then, the feeling that there was us, and then there was them – the straight people. The feeling that you were either on the bus or off the bus. The feeling that good and evil were clear-cut […]. And, most important, the feeling that there was a good chance that we would win. These days we all assume that Ollie North³ was lying, and know that there’s not a damned thing we can do about it.

From which I just realized that Heimel was a Boomer. Only they weren’t called Boomers in those days. But she’s still funny. When you read Heimel, you realize that Boomers were people once too, before they got old and tied up the country’s wealth in ridiculous homes and adult diapers and all that⁴.

I’ve been reading a lot lately that employers are – shocking, I know – firing Gen-Z workers. On LinkedIn, you can read posts excoriating these employers for not moving with the times; or excoriating the Gen-Z workers for, well, being young. I’ve been around long enough to read, every time a new generation graduates into the workforce, newspaper articles then online opinion pieces then social media posts about how the latest generation is shockingly unprepared for the workplace.

I’ve always worked in organizations that attract a lot of younger people and the thing that strikes me about these articles are a) the young adults who are being held up as representative of their generation are guilty mainly of being young and making the mistakes that young people make; and b) that the people complaining about their attitude work for places that recruit entitled people, from ivy league schools and such. Like, don’t you know how to do a job interview that weeds out people who are going to behave like that?; and c) the main problem with Gen-Z as opposed to the older generations is that they grew up on social media, where people pretend to be perfect and show off designer clothes and cars and houses and entertainment experiences, and brain-wash Gen-Z kids into believing that everyone else lives like this and they have been deprived because they are forced to share a ratty apartment way the heck out on the F-line or the L with three other people their age. What they don’t realize is that you make no money when you are just starting out and you live like a rat for many years⁵ Yes, they have a few other things against them that the older generations didn’t have: college tuition debt is ridiculously unsustainable; there’s a housing shortage⁶; and life generally sucks, thanks to policies and politics started by Ronald Reagan.

So anyway, Boomers aren’t all elderly idiots to be written off. Heimel’s work is so much fun that you can still find her stuff relatively easily. Give it a shot; you might enjoy.

1. True story: when I was in high school, we used to enliven our nights sitting around Denny’s, ordering endless cups of coffee (or in my case, tea) by reading copies of the Village Voice. Now, how copies of the Voice ended up in a small college town – the entire population of which would fit in the old Shea Stadium – all the way at the other end of the country, I don’t know. One friend’s favorite thing to do was to go through the ads in the back of the Voice, hit us up for coins, and then monopolize the pay phone back by the bathrooms to call phone sex lines. She was ultimately frustrated because they inevitably hung up on her within 15 seconds. ↩︎
2. Apparently Heimel did write for Kate & Allie. ↩︎
3. For those of you who weren’t sentient in the 1980s, Ollie North was a liar who did Reagan’s dirty work, and then claimed he was a patriot. ↩︎
4. Not slamming Boomers here; my gen is apparently tying up their wealth in MAGA wear and Q-Anon crap. This is what we get for watching X-Files and Close Encounters at an impressionable age. There’s enough blame to go around. ↩︎
5. I myself shared in an apartment under the Manhattan side of the Williamsburg Bridge, on a block so bad that still sucks all these years later, with three other people, an apartment where the bodega next door was a drug front that only sold expired food, and where the people next door shot out the windows one night when someone complained out that window that their music was too loud, and the drug addicts (or perhaps the landlord) burnt down the shooting gallery on the other side of my building, and cab drivers didn’t want to drop me off. ↩︎
6. Or, some would say, a people overage. The earth is overpopulated. Covid tried to do something about that and it didn’t work. So now she’s working on bird flu. Time will tell. ↩︎