Men's Guide to the Women's Bathrooms
Men's Guide to the Women's Bathrooms
Feeling melancholy and indolent, thirty-four year old Claire St. John, a career lawyer, leaves New York and a broken marriage to go back to her hometown Austin in Texas. Then she goes off to Mexico on a Diving Adventure for Freshly Divorced Singles, and there she gets her Great Idea: to write a book about the women’s bathroom, that “sacred place where every deep, dark secret is revealed”. A book that will tell men what happens behind that door and about how the women in there know how to be sincere, lucid and ferocious. A book meant to bridge the proverbial communication gap between the sexes. Cheerful and bungling, inclined to drink a bit too much, Claire dispenses consolation and advice to her girlfriends ready to embark in relationships that are disastrous by definition; armed with her PC, she drags it from café to café in search of inspiration; she laughs and fights with Aaron, her omnipresent gay friend and personal stylist; she tries to stem her mom’s apprehensions; she forces herself to hold off her ex-husband who’s trying for an impossible reconciliation. Then, one day, Jake enters the scene: sexy, cute, gallant. What should she do? Believe in him? Believe what he says? Because Claire loves theorizing about how the Right One doesn’t exist… even though Jake is all too similar to the model. Claire’s light and ironic voice, interspersed with pages of her slowly forming “book within a book”, talks about an America of too many weddings and too many divorces, women’s anxiety about enforced solitude, the disarming and sometimes ridiculous attempts to communicate with the other sex made by those who still believe in love, or at least who believe they believe in it.