Candace Bushnell: Sex, success, the city and the zeitgeist
Candace Bushnell, once called 'Jane Austen with a martini', turns a sharp, forensic gaze on New York's super-rich in her new novel

The Big Interview by Christina Patterson in The Independent, Friday, 7 November 2008

When Sex and the City hit the big screen earlier this year, the characters looked a little older, if not necessarily wiser. It was, after all, more than a decade since Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte exploded into our Friday nights with their taboo-breaking, ball-breaking tales of sex and the single woman in a city where the perfect Manolo proved a damn sight easier to find than the perfect man. Carrie's creator, and alter ego, Candace Bushnell, looks not just a little older than her super-glamorous jacket photo. She also looks more fragile. This is a woman who has worked for success, and it shows.

It's 14 years since she started writing the column that became the novel that became the TV series that became the film, 14 years since her clear-eyed portrayal of toxic bachelors and nerdy no-hopers in a society with "its own cruel mating rituals, as complicated and sophisticated as those in an Edith Wharton novel", propelled her from a land of hope to a land of glory, 14 years since those martini-sipping Manhattanites shattered the stereotype of sad spinsterhood, perhaps for ever.

And now, in her fifth novel, One Fifth Avenue, there's a character who "had watched every single episode of Sex and the City at least 'a hundred times'," and comes to New York in search of "her own Mr Big". Postmodern irony, you might say, except that Bushnell's satire on the New York sexual landscape has itself become such a part of that landscape that it might be more unrealistic to ignore it. Sex and the zeitgeist has proved a potent cocktail, and a lucrative one.

Read the full piece at The Independent online.