Candace Bushnell

It was late one night, deep in the harsh winter of 1993, and in the city that never sleeps, struggling writer Candace Bushnell wasn’t sleeping either. Instead, the strikingly attractive, 33-year-old blonde sat drunk, distressed and alone in her freezing, overpriced and roach-infested apartment, with tears in her eyes, mascara streaking down her face and a loaded pistol on the battered coffee table in front of her.

This definitely wasn’t the New York state of mind she’d aspired to when she’d arrived here as a teenager. After 15 years of big city living, and countless rejections and disappointments, her self-esteem had finally hit rock bottom, and she was so emotionally choked up she could barely breathe.
She felt humiliated, like she’d failed – in love, in life, in everything. Her writing ‘career’ was a joke, though no longer one that seemed even remotely funny. The fridge was empty, the rent was overdue, and she hadn’t sold an article in almost six weeks. As for her ‘love-life’… She laughed, despairingly. She was smart and self-aware enough to know that she was very attractive, yet she still couldn’t seem to find a good man. She even had a name for the eternally disappointing types she kept on meeting. She called them “toxic bachelors.” Ha!
She picked the gun up, clicked off the safety catch, put it to her head and willed herself to pull the trigger. A self-confessed drama queen, it wasn’t the first time she’d contemplated suicide, not by a long shot, but this was the first time she’d gone so far as to get a gun. She held the cold steel to her temple for about a minute, fantasising about putting an end to it all.
Then, as she always did, she got to thinking about how hurt and devastated her parents back home in Connecticut would be if their beloved eldest daughter were to kill herself. How bad her two sisters and her friends would feel. How pointless it would be. Her survival instinct kicked in. Berating herself for being so gutless, she put the weapon back on the table, fell back on the couch and sobbed herself to fitful sleep. She’d live to fight another day.
A decade on, she’s able to laugh about it, but Candace Bushnell says she truly was at the end of her tether that dark New York night when she held a loaded gun to her head and contemplated suicide.
“That night probably was the lowest point of my life,” she recalls. “And when I talk to other women, who’re now a bit older, that sort of age of 32/33 can be quite a difficult age for women. Everyone thinks turning 30 is a big milestone, but you turn 30 and you feel great and you then maybe move on a bit and you start to think, ‘Oh gosh, well, I should have done this by now’ or ‘I should have done that by now’ and you kinda look around and go, ‘Yikes – I haven’t really accomplished any of the things that I meant to accomplish!’
“I don’t know, it might be true of men to a certain extent as well, but I think those sort of feelings are especially prevalent in women of that age. It’s kinda that do or die time where you have to start making it.”

Needless to say, Candace Bushnell did, rather than died. A couple of months after that dark, despairing night, her big journalistic breakthrough finally came when she began writing her now infamous Sex And The City column for the New York Observer. Drawing upon her considerable knowledge and experience of the city’s single’s scene, the column quickly became renowned for its acerbic wit and spot-on insights into the rules and rhythms of the Big Apple’s dating and mating game.
The collected columns became a bestselling book, the book became a hugely successful TV series and, depending on who you were asking, Bushnell soon found herself being variously feted as ‘the Dorothy Parker for the millennium’ or ‘the Sharon Stone of journalism’. The Evening Standard even reckoned she was ‘some kind of genius’.
Today, rich, famous and a decade older, she’s sitting pretty in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel on the tail-end of a whirlwind promotional tour for her debut novel Trading Up (already an international bestseller). She’s tired and sounds slightly hoarse – having done non-stop interviews in Amsterdam, London and Edinburgh over the last three days – but still looks terrific. Her hair and make-up are perfect, her designer clothes are immaculate and her colourfully chequered Prada shoes alone would’ve probably covered the rent in her old apartment for at least six months.
The most interesting (and expensive) item she’s wearing, though, is the big glittering rock on her finger. Yes folks, after much profitable procrastination, the woman who introduced such concepts as ‘toxic bachelors’ and ‘modelisers’ into the common parlance has finally tied the knot! Having been romantically linked with various high profile suitors – including Vogue publisher Ron Gallotti, Penthouse’s Bob Guccione Jr and venture capitalist Stephen Morris – last summer, on her 43rd birthday, Bushnell married ballet dancer Charles Askegard on a secluded Nantucket beach.
“I met him at a Gala for the New York City Ballet,” she says, before proudly reminding me, “because, of course, he is a principal dancer for the New York City Ballet. I’d always wanted to go to this ballet gala and I was in a place in my life where I felt like, ‘I’m just gonna go!’ And I actually went by myself, although I had borrowed a big diamond from Harry Winston, and it was so expensive that it actually came with a security guard. So I didn’t have a date but my diamond did! So off we went, and I ended up meeting my husband, and it was kind of an instant attraction.”
It must have been. The love-struck couple got married after just seven-and-a-half weeks of dating.
“It was very fast but I think when you know, you know,” she smiles, lighting up a Silk Cut Blue (she’s just run out of her trademark Merit Ultra Lights). “And we both knew very quickly. I feel like men make up their minds fairly quickly about relationships. You know, they sort of put women in four categories – not interested at all or interested in something very brief. Then there’s kind of someone that maybe I would date and she’d be a girlfriend but I don’t think I want to marry, and then this is someone who I think I could marry.”
Your new husband is a lot younger than you, isn’t he?
“He’s ten years younger,” she admits, with a sly Samantha Jones-style grin. “Ten years ago it would have been kind of unusual, but it all seems quite norm – you know, quite normal really. It’s not unusual in New York. I have a couple of girlfriends who are married and they are married to younger men. They are six or ten years younger.”
Given that you made your journalistic reputation by dissecting relationships, did you not analyse your motivations to death?
“I did analyse our relationship a bit because I think we both felt like, ‘Oohh, something is happening here’ and it was very romantic. But the thing that I did notice was that we seemed to get to a level of communication very quickly that I think a lot of people never get to in a relationship, or it takes a long time to get there. We just seemed to click in that way.”
Do you see this as a lifelong thing?
“I think one certainly hopes so!” she says, looking slightly offended at the question. “I mean, that’s really the ideal and I think that’s what one believes, until proven otherwise.”
Was it the happiest day of your life?
“Well, it was certainly one of the happiest days of my life. I mean, it was really great. Of course, it’s always a little bit stressful organising it all. God, I remember after my husband and I got married we all went back to our little cottage. We’d rented a little cottage and everybody came back for champagne and then we all went to the restaurant, a very elegant restaurant, and my husband and I were driving together in a jeep – you know, an open top – and it was sunset. I think it was about 8:30 in the evening and we had a bottle of champagne and that was such an amazing moment, we were just laughing and we were so happy and it was so beautiful and you know, we had our first moment alone together, so it was really spectacular.”
How did it compare to the publication day of your first book?
“You know, it was interesting because when the book Sex and the City came out I was very… [pauses]. I remember I was very lonely, so there was something interestingly bittersweet about that moment of having the triumph of having the book published, but feeling like my personal life was really a disaster.”
As it happened, her personal life remained fairly disastrous for several years after Sex and the City’s 1996 publication. Her career, on the other hand, went stratospheric – particularly once the daringly raunchy HBO show hit television screens two years later, and Samantha, Carrie, Miranda and Charlotte became the most famous TV friends since, em, Friends. A huge fan of the series, Bushnell is sad that it’s now in its sixth and final season.
“I just love the show,” the real-life Carrie Bradshaw sighs. “I’m not happy it’s ending at all. I’m one of the fans who wishes it would go on for a bit longer. I think that this, the sixth season is… it feels very relevant to me – and very real. Actually I watched one of my favourite episodes just last night in the hotel.”
Were you personally involved in the making of it at all?
“I was a little bit at the beginning during the first two seasons. I was the co-producer on the pilot, which meant that they were terribly nice to me and very, very respectful and asked me about things. You know, the producer Darren Star would ask, ‘What do you think of this actress or that actress?’ But now I just love watching it. I’ll be really sorry when it’s gone.”
Even as the TV show gained popularity and attracted increasingly massive audiences on both sides of the Atlantic pond, Bushnell didn’t rest on her laurels. Initially her new-found fame led her into television presenting, but it wasn’t long before she was back slaving over her laptop again.
“I did the column from 1994 to 1996,” she explains. “And then after the book of collected columns came out I did some other things. I actually had a TV show on VH1, which really wasn’t terribly good! Although, I watched some old tapes recently and I thought, you know, I really actually wasn’t that bad! It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was. And then I wrote a couple of movie scripts and I wrote Four Blondes, which was kind of like four novellas. I kept busy, you know.”
She says that the reaction to her literary success amongst her contemporaries in the New York media scene (she counts Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis amongst her closest friends) was mostly warm and supportive.
“I think the feeling in New York is that it’s not like a pie of a limited number of slices, and I think people’s feeling is that there really is one for everybody. And I think that’s a bit of a change in attitude probably fostered by the women’s movement, you know, women going into offices. At first I think that was a bit tricky because men were territorial and didn’t necessarily like the women invading their spaces and now I think that there is that idea that if you’re good and you’re really good at what you do, there is room for everybody. Of course, the reality is that it takes quite a bit of hard work.”
Having said that, she’s had her fair share of begrudgers and detractors as well.
“You know, it’s interesting,” she muses, daintily placing a finger to her pointy chin. “You don’t understand it until after you publish a couple of books. Eventually you understand that there are people who you know, they have never met you but they are out to get you. It’s always a bit shocking to find that there are those people in the corner with the long knives and they may have met you or they may not have met you but they have an idea about you and they’re just out to get you.
“But, if you’ve done your job as a writer, it’s inevitable that you are going to touch on a nerve in someone and you are going to touch on some kind of psychological or emotional issue that they have unresolved and they are going to turn all of their fury on you.” She smiles and shrugs. “But what the hell!”
Are you a tough cookie?
“I can be tough if I need to be,” she admits. “But I prefer not to be. I think one should only bring these things out when absolutely necessary.”
“What kind of things?” I ask, innocently. Her jaw tightens and her eyes turn to charcoal black. “Just… things,” she smiles, evilly.

Things? If Candace Bushnell is anywhere near as devious as her fictional characters (and, of course, she invented them so she must be close) then you really wouldn’t want to cross her. Trading Up tells the story of one Janey Wilcox – a morally ambiguous, thirtysomething, lingerie model trying to make it as an actress in New York. Although it has a frothy pink design and you could easily jamb a heavy door with its 548 pages, it’s a book that most definitely shouldn’t be judged by its cover. Chicklit it ain’t!
A serious novel about people playing the fame game and living fairly shallow and materialistic lives, there’s a wealth of wisdom and life experience in Bushnell’s sharply observed prose. A highly satirical look at the lives of the superrich and famous, this is truly masterful storytelling, as un-putdownable as a loaded crackpipe. Think a female Scott Fitzgerald, or Emily Bronte hits the Hamptons, and you’ve got the idea.
Bushnell is justifiably proud of her book but, now that I’ve mentioned it, agrees with me about the cover (“Actually, I suppose the pink does make it look a bit… light or something”). Ever since she was a little girl, she’d always wanted to be a writer and, although both Sex And The City and Four Blondes were bestsellers, she’s particularly pleased to finally have a ‘proper’ novel under her belt.
The book is set in 2000, when the stock markets were higher than ever before and the Big Apple was awash with serious money, with new millionaires being created every minute and tables at Elaine’s becoming increasingly harder to book. Times have changed so much and so quickly, it already almost seems like a throwback to a different, even more innocent, age. As a quintessential New Yorker, how does she remember the aftershock of 9/11?
“Well, I think certainly for a few months afterwards New York was a much quieter place. I remember, even at Christmas, going to parties and there was no-one on the street. I think people stayed in more and kept to themselves a bit more. You know, it was a time of mourning.”
Did you lose anybody close in the attack?
“I did actually,” she nods, sadly. “Which is not so great really and, of course, it’s something that one thinks about quite a bit actually. You don’t really forget and the person who I lost was actually someone who I had known since I was a kid, a friend of the family and the parents.”
She’s unaligned to any political party (“I just vote for the best candidate”) and, undoubtedly anxious to avoid any controversy back home, visibly balks when I ask her opinion of George Bush Jnr.
“That’s such a hard question!” she protests. “You know, I don’t quite know. I don’t quite know what to think and I haven’t been in… [pauses] I’ve been on this book tour, you know, unfortunately, for the last couple of months and it seem like that takes up all one’s time and mental state, and I haven’t actually thought about it for a couple of months. I think there was quite a lot of initial support for him and one hopes that it’s all going to come out okay.”
Does she approve of the war on terrorism and the invasion of Iraq?
“Em, I think that…” She falters for a moment. “Well, it’s just unfortunate about certain things that have come out about the chemical weapons and that sort of thing, but right now I’m very much in support of my country.”
So you’re a patriotic American?
“Em… you know, we probably just shouldn’t talk about politics,” she says, shooting me a glacial look that most definitely says ‘change the subject, buster!’ “But I am patriotic. I do support my country.”
There’s a moment’s uncomfortable silence before she picks up the promotional baton and starts running with it again.
“But going back to the book, I set it when I did because I remember there was a feeling in New York in the year 2000 of, you know, we had the millennium and there was a bit of a flap about that Y2K, and then that all came and went.
“And I think in the Spring the stock market was at the highest it had ever been in history, and there was this feeling of people having a lot of money. People felt that they had a lot of money, even though it was only paper money, and it was a feeling that things were just going to go on forever like this and nothing was going to change. So there was almost this feeling of, em, excitement but also maybe an underlying feeling of jadedness.”
When I tell her a little about Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy and the resulting rise in house prices, she nods sympathetically. “I know, somebody told me about that earlier,” she says. “But, I mean, it seems like it’s everywhere. It seems like no matter how much money you make, you don’t seem to get anywhere! And of course Janey Wilcox is somebody who understands that all too well.”

A younger, less successful, incarnation of Janey Wilcox first made an appearance in Four Blondes, but the novella really only skimmed the surface of her complex personality. In Trading Up a lot more is revealed and, while much of her behaviour is still thoroughly reprehensible, it’s to Bushnell’s credit as a writer that the reader often finds himself sympathising with her. Even when she’s marrying men for their money, shagging her best friend’s man and generally being a total bitch, you still find yourself strangely rooting for the self-obsessed beauty.
“She’s an anti-heroine and, as you can probably tell, she’s an outsider and she looks at the world in a way in that… Em, she’s a survivor in the sort of backed up against the corner, kind of way. Having said that, Janey Wilcox certainly does believe in true love – whatever that is – but she doesn’t know how to get it.”
Some readers have been less understanding of the novel’s complex central character, however. So much so, that they’ve even asked the author to kill her off!
“I’ve had people say that they loved the book but they feel that I should definitely do another book about her and she should be murdered. I mean she should be viciously murdered!” Bushnell laughs and lights a cigarette. “That’s kind of interesting. At the end of the day it is a character in a book but it’s interesting that one can create this character that brings out so much in people that they actually want the character to be murdered. I don’t think I have ever felt that way about a real person in my life, I have to tell you. Of course, we have a moment when it’s like, ‘I wish that person would go away, just get run over by a car or something’ but I never wish it on anybody.”
The book features a vast array of memorably drawn characters – from drug-addled rock stars and billionaire media tycoons to junkie models and self-obsessed novelists. Are any of them based on real people?
“There is nobody in the book who is based on a real person but they’re types,” she explains. “There are definite types in New York and I think that there are those types of people everywhere - but in New York it’s just bigger because there’s more money. I think when people, for instance, in New York, read the book they always go, ‘Oh, I know that kind of person.’ But there’s nobody directly based on anyone.”
Nobody, that is, except for English journalist and failed man about Manhattan, Toby Young. Having been mentioned in Young’s truly hilarious account of his brief but eventful career at Vanity Fair, How To Lose Friends And Alienate People, Bushnell returns the favour by namechecking him in Trading Up.
“Oh, I just love Toby!” she laughs. “So yeah, there’s a little mention of him. Because there was something in his book that I thought was very, very striking, so I have one of the characters at the end of the book mention something about him going to the Vanity Fair party. I put his name in just because I love Toby. He’s a real character!”
Perversely enough (or rather, not perversely enough), while there’s plenty of sexual activity in the story, there are very few actual sex scenes.
“No,” she laughs, looking slightly embarrassed. “My problem is that because so many people write about sex, and probably write about it rather well, I feel like you shouldn’t write actual sex scenes unless you can do them well. I don’t think I’m good at writing actual sex scenes. I think I can write about sex in a kind of funny kind of way – like sex gone bad, or sex that isn’t supposed to be – but I just can’t do the actual descriptive stuff. It just comes out like bad porn. I think, as a writer, that we all have limitations and you have to work within your limitations and develop the things that you do best.”
Does Candace Bushnell consider herself a feminist?
“I do!” she nods her head vigorously. “I am always trying to get across the message to women that it is important to value yourself outside of whatever relationships you might have and to have your own identity as a person in the world separate from your relationships. Of course, we all need balance but part of that balance is that kind of self identity and self esteem that comes from yourself alone.”
I presume you’ve made a lot of money by this stage?
“Well, enough to keep going for the moment,” she admits. “I don’t feel I could retire just yet.”
So have you got your eyes on a house in the Hamptons or a massive West Side apartment?
“I couldn’t buy one of those apartments, no, not like the ones in the book. But maybe the next book will do it, who knows? I just keep plugging away.”
There’s a lot left unresolved at the end of Trading Up. Are you planning a sequel in the near future?
“Hmm…” Candace Bushnell smiles mischievously and cutely furrows her brow. “I’m totally happy with it. It really came out the way I wanted it to come out. So it was a lot of work but I’m really pleased. And I’m quite sort of consumed at the moment with what the next book is going to be, with what that’s going to be about. I have a couple of books in mind and hopefully I’ve got a couple of years to write them. But is Janey going to be in it? Hopefully. I mean, there’s always going to be a little bit of something more to say.”
I don’t doubt it for a moment.

Trading Up by Candace Bushnell is available now in all good bookshops (Abacus, 12.99)