Candace Bushnell: 'So many women tell me Sex And The City changed their lives'
Candace Bushnell will speak about her life at the Olympia in Dublin in May. Picture: Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images.
When she arrived in New York from Connecticut as an 18-year-old in the late 1970s, Candace Bushnell was “pretty fearless”. “I was really wild, and I was like, out of control, and I don't know where that came from,” the 66-year-old author and creator tells the from her home in the Hamptons, as a large poodle lolls by a window behind her.
“Because of course, now I'm very organised and take care of everything. And back then I was just like: I've got to embrace life and whatever comes my way.”
She soon established herself on the NYC party scene, then as a journalist, and later as the columnist behind (SATC), which was turned into a TV series in 1998. Sarah Jessica Parker starred as Carrie Bradshaw, a thinly-disguised Bushnell who was trying to find love in the big city.
The show - insightful, sparky, saucy and gossipy - became a pivotal moment in popular culture. You could legitimately say that the world wasn’t the same after SATC.
Bushnell spills all about SATC and her career in her live show, which will come to Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre on May 13. “It's the origin story of It's mixed in with my life story, but a lot of it is how I wrote Sex in the City, how hard I worked to get there, why I invented Carrie Bradshaw, and what happened to me afterward,” she says.
The show also explores her experiences of menopause (positive) and dating after her divorce from ballet dancer Charles Askegard (less positive): “And some of the different types of guys that you will encounter, like the ‘senior age player’, or SAP… and the randy older guy who says that he's 75 but when you google him, he turns out to be 87.” Bushnell has plenty of juicy tales about dating, many of which she has also channelled into her 10 books.
Yet she says people are often surprised at the live show to discover the many parallels between and Bushnell’s real life. “Also, women seem to find it very, very inspiring,” she says. “It really has a feminist point of view, which is my point of view: of being your own Mr. Big, as opposed to being with Mr Big. It's about being an independent woman and making your own money.” (For the few who haven’t watched Mr Big is Carrie’s on-off lover and then husband in the series, and dies dramatically in the recent SATC spin-off He was reportedly inspired by Bushnell’s relationship with publisher Ron Galotti.)
Her parents were “horrified” that she wanted to be a writer, “but they pretty much knew there was nothing they could do, so… whatever,” says Bushnell. It was a struggle to make it in the city, she says.
“Now when I look back, I realise that 90% of people who were in the media and were writers in New York came from incredibly privileged backgrounds. They all went to Ivy League schools. They all knew each other, or they had family money, or they had a support system, and I didn't have any of that. I think if I'd known how much privilege was really a requirement, I probably would not have pursued that. I don't know what I would have pursued.”
Does she feel proud of herself when she looks back? “I do. I do. And for some reason, I did really believe in myself really strongly, and I really felt that I was a writer. And it was the most important thing in my life, being a writer.”
People immediately began paying attention to her Sex and the City column in the when it launched in 1994. But she notes she had already been writing about similar topics - “social status, money, power, sex and being a woman in that mix. I mean, it was really very Edith Wharton, in a sense” - for women’s magazines, but says no one took it seriously. The was considered a more ‘serious’ magazine, mainly because it had a lot of men reading it and writing for it.
Bushnell worked at a number of women’s magazines early in her career, and says that they helped disseminate the feminist message. “It was women's magazines who were talking about the big O, orgasms and sex and how women had a right to be sexually satisfied,” she says. There was much of their spirit in - but updated for the 1990s. “So many women come up to me and they say that changed their lives, and gave them a different way to think about relationships,” she says.
Lately she’s noticed a new, 2020s twist on social media: the de-centering of men. “And there are a lot of women who are saying: I'm not going to do relationships anymore, because I don't need to get hurt and I don't need to do all of this unpaid emotional labour. It's so interesting to me.”
It “feels great” to hear that had an impact on women’s lives. “That's one of the things that really keeps you going. Because, let's face it - real life, it's kind of boring,” says Bushnell. She is a strong feminist, but says she is “fairly radical in my ideas, so I keep a lot of them to myself”.
“But I still feel like feminism is probably the most important thing in the world right now, because everything stems from feminism,” she adds. “And we have some real issues with [she sighs deeply]... the men. Men are very destructive, and they are followers. They are not leaders. They all coalesce behind one crazy guy… not such a good way to be, as we are realising, finally. But you know, this happens in history again and again and again. I think it's really time to disrupt the whole male-female paradigm.”
How do we do that? “I have no idea. I don't know, maybe Sex in the City is helping. But I think it's something that women have to do every single day,” says Bushnell, teasingly adding: “We need to… I don't want to go into it because it sounds too extreme. But it's like, you gotta start by earning your own money. People always ask what would I do differently if I could go back. What I would do differently in my 20s is I would really focus on making money and getting power and status - from myself, not through a man. So it's very, very important that women have an equal seat at the table.”
Lots of things feel “upsetting and out of control” in the world right now, says Bushnell, and she particularly fears for young people. In her early years in NYC she knew the current US President Donald Trump, though they weren’t friends.
“He seemed to be a really, really New York character,” she says, describing how his turn on reality show The Apprentice launched his career and saw people in her orbit impersonating him. But she’s not too enthused about talking about him.
“And that's all I got to say about it,” she shrugs.
Back to a topic she doesn’t mind talking about: her work. Besides her upcoming live tour, she is writing a memoir, an article on dating and an optioned TV series based on her book One Fifth Avenue. “So I'm starting to work on that,” she says, before adding in her trademark dry humour: “Or I could just drop dead - you never know. That’s one of the realities when you get to my age.” We get the feeling that there are still many, many more tales that Bushnell is yet to share with us.
- Candace Bushnell’s True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and The City will come to Dublin’s Olympia Theatre on May 13, 2025. Tickets from €48.40 to €106.25
