He rejects Kay 2, though not for several months, because she is just too normal and nice. (The real problem of Kay 1, by the way, is her doctor’s bag of terrifying sex toys.) Chloe, his first one-night stand after the break-up with Elizabeth, his wife, barely survives until dawn after he sees that she was wearing a “pair of socks no man should be allowed to see”.A fling with Tiina (yes, two “i”s in the name), a Finnish restaurateur, was apparently doomed the minute she smuggled him into the toilets of her newly opened eatery to have her way with him against the white-tiled walls. She apparently ruined the magic by asking, mid-flagrante, what it was about her that appealed to him. “‘You have great hair,’ was all I could muster, and my eye wandered to the sign that said ‘EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS’”. Poor Tiina kept chasing him for weeks thereafter, but Marin was never able to get past the hand-washing vision and swiftly moved on to other quarry.The book – already optioned for a film by Miramax – was surprisingly hard to locate in New York bookshops this week Perhaps this is simply because it has been selling well. There is nothing more reassuring than discovering that the dating experiences of another have been even more tragic than your own.

Alternatively, it may be that every woman who recognises herself in the book has rushed to the nearest Barnes & Noble and purchased it in bulk to ensure that no one can read it and possibly recognise them. Never mind that Marin gives false first names to all his past partners. The fact is that many of them came from the rather small and highly gossipy media universe of Gotham, and attaching real names to all of Marin’s past customers has already become a highly amusing sport in the industry. “I was scanning for details that might identify pals and acquaintances,” wrote Nina Burleigh in The New York Observer this week.

“Woe to the women identified by first name only: most of them are real-life members of the New York media community and Mr Marin has carnal knowledge of all of them.”Thus this recent, very anonymous, observation from one of his past fancies. She had actually forgotten about her Marin tryst until the book came out. Imagine the shock, she explained, when “you find out that, while all this time you’ve been trying to repress the memory of your yucky, low-point-of-life misdirected affection, he has been revelling in the memories. Maybe not of you personally, but of other girls like you, girls who had sex too quickly…

girls who thought that when he said he was interested in them he actually was. In fact, your old flame has been thinking of himself as quite the chick magnet, the rascal, the Casanova.”The more desperate among the single men in Manhattan may have been rushing for their copies in some hope of picking up dating tips. Marin admits at one moment that his strategy amounts to little more than “relentless scheming, plotting and premeditation”, coupled with a good dose of what he calls “rehearsed spontaneity”. This last trick is surely also gleaned from his work as a journalist. Any scribe who has done sufficient interviews knows how to look as if they are earnestly listening and absorbing every word when really they are quietly hatching their next question or move.