A chat with the 'real' Carrie

Candace Bushnell

NEW YORK — May looks set to become Carrie month in the Big Apple with billboards advertising Sex and the City 2 and bookstore displays piled high with stacks of the new prequel novel by Candace Bushnell. The Carrie Diaries reveals the early years of New York’s most famous sex columnist and one of the most influential characters of the last decade. I sat down with the “real” Carrie to find out more.

Meeting Candace Bushnell is certainly a little intimidating. She has the same small and slender build, blond hair and pale blue eyes as Sarah Jessica Parker. Her big gold watch, towering heels fresh from Chanel and her skinny jeans make her look like anything but an author.

She gives off a typically New York air of self-assurance, speaks loudly and doesn’t mince words. Thirty-two years of climbing the ladder of success in New York gives a person very thick skin.

She talks openly about having Botox treatments, quitting smoking, only shopping twice a year and about finally finding love with a star dancer in the New York Ballet who is 10 years her junior. They were married in 2002.

For the record, she’s still friends with the real Mr. Big — millionaire magazine editor Ron Galotti. He lives in Vermont with his horses. Bushnell gave him the nickname because he was short. Chris Noth, who plays Mr. Big in the series, lives in the same building as she does.

At age 51, Bushnell decided it was time to tell the story of Carrie, the character she describes as her alter ego. She wrote The Carrie Diaries over a year, both in New York and at her home in Connecticut. She’s already in the middle of writing the second instalment, due out in summer 2011, which describes Carrie’s arrival in New York and the moment she meets Samantha. Fans can expect a movie adaptation of this one, too.

Carrie’s story is similar to Bushnell’s. Born in Connecticut, at age eight, she already knew she wanted to write. “I came to New York at 19 with that dream,” the author said. “As a teenager, I was already very independent and determined.”

You needed guts to move to Manhattan at the end of the 1970s, especially if you were a woman. “I quickly realized that you had to fight to survive here. New York was very edgy back then, but I immediately loved the people, the noise, the danger and the endless opportunities.” She changed apartments six times during her first year and had cockroaches as roommates.

Her first job at a magazine involved sharpening pencils for her boss. “But I was the best pencil sharpener,” she remembered. Her life changed in 1994 when The New York Observer offered her a column on sex and dating in the Big Apple.

Sex and the City was born. It was such a success that she was offered a book deal and a TV series after the fourth article. Even though she held on to all those early columns and sometimes still rereads them, there’s no going back to the life of a sex columnist in 2010.

“I’m 51! I’m going to stick to novels,” she said. Bushnell also authored Lipstick Jungle (that was also made into a TV show with limited success) and One Fifth Avenue.

The Carrie Diaries is her first move into teen literature. Her adult fans will find it a lot tamer than Sex and the City. “I didn’t think about that. I just wanted to write a real book about the life of a 17-year-old teenager and the emotional turmoil involved,” she explained.

Does Bushnell believe Carrie changed the women of New York? “I don’t know, but lots of young women tell me they moved to New York because of Sex and the City. I think I did a good job showing what it’s like being single in New York.”

You can say that again.

A peek in the Diaries

What’s in The Carrie Diaries?

We find a 17-year-old Carrie Bradshaw in her last year of high school.

She lives in a small town outside of New York. She’s the oldest of three girls and her friends call her Bradley. She’s dating a boy who treats her like dirt. Her librarian mother died of cancer when she was 13 and her father is a scientist who builds rockets.

Her mother inspired her very individualistic sense of style (early on in the book she’s wearing white patent leather boots) along with her love of writing and her feminist leanings. In one passage she describes marriage as a “form of legalized prostitution.”

After enrolling in a writing program, she finally makes the big move to New York where she has her purse stolen on her first day.

Alone and penniless, she contacts the only person she knows in the city.

The book ends with Carrie dialing a number in a phone booth before saying, “Samantha Jones, please.”