It’s been a long and wonderful journey from the conception of our novel How to Survive New York on Three Dates a Week to the writing of it and now the publishing of it. My co-author and bestie, Corinne Barlow, and I came up with the concept after our first summer living in New York City straight out of college. We were doe-eyed and new to the whole dating scene. Real dating. NYC dating. Yeah, we’d dated before. If you count hanging out in dorm rooms, going to a frat parties, house parties, or some other venue where playing games to get shit-faced and end up face planted on your mattress (sleeping! Usually sleeping…), dating. But after we moved to NYC, we were being taken out to Michelan star restaurants, clubs, fashion shows, and galleries in the world and it sent our pretty little heads spinning.
What we didn’t expect (we should have drank less Cosmos and watched more Sex in the City) were the amount of crazies that showed up in our life in NYC. Not just the guys. The friends, roommates, and co-workers, too. I know. I know. How could we not know this? Everyone knows the craziest people in the world live in The Big Apple.
So when the latest freakshow, lay asleep in one of our beds, refusing to leave, Corinne and I stuffed our faces with mini donuts from the bodega under our five-floor walk-up (too hungover and broke to venture out for anything else), and realized he was the latest in a long line of misadventures we’d experienced.
But we didn’t care. We laughed so hard that morning recalling everything we’d been through so far that we dropped the whole box of donuts in a heap on the floor (and continued to eat them- did I mention we were broke… and hungover). We were having the time of our life: hopping to the front of the line at clubs, getting free swag from the hottest labels, dating rich men and poor men, and everyone in between, surviving in comfort and style even with our starter-jobs.
And so sprouted the seeds for our book, How to Survive New York on Three Dates a Week. It only got bigger, better, and crazier from there.