Like most feminists of my generation, I have an ambiguous relationship with Carrie Bradshaw, the writer-protagonist of Candace Bushnell’s Sex and the City. However, when I posit this ambiguity as typical post-feminist cop out against taking an extreme position one way or other, do note I am referring to the series (and the global franchise), not the book.
Sex and the City: the book
The book, a collection of essays published together in 1997, is truly a groundbreaking text: brittle, honest, clever, and grounded in the socio-cultural Zeitgeist of a specific upper-class, primarily white, 90s-Manhattan moment, flush with the new money of hedge fund salaries or successes in fashion and publishing, and brash in the afterglow of the Washington Consensus of 1989 which made New York City arguably the centre of a newly financialized world order, all funny money and innovation. Over the invisible foundations of this economics, lay the superstructure of Candace Bushnell’s world.
Let’s talk about the book, which, really, ought to be talked about more!
Between 1994 and 1997, while she lived in a studio apartment much like Carrie, slept on a foam mattress when she was too skint to buy a bed, and struggled with finances regularly, Candace Bushnell wrote a radical column in the New York Observer, based on her own experiences – as well as those of her girl-friends – as they negotiated career, sex, it-parties, it-vacations in the East Hamptons, and sometimes love in Manhattan.
When her conservative Connecticut parents announced they were getting a subscription to the Observer, Bushnell invented her alter ego Carrie Bradshaw to hide behind a thin veil of fiction the experiences of their generation. The success of the column got Bushnell a book deal.
In the first chapter of Sex and the City, the book, appear these memorable lines:
Now this is a powerful original voice; ironic, indulgent, and self-aware all at once. Cynical, true, but also open to infinite shades of vulnerability. Therefore, as I reiterate, there is no ambiguity about my feelings for the book.
So we bring it down to “love and labels”?
The show, however, is a different kettle of fish.
In 1995, Darren Star bought the rights to the book for a lumpsum. And after that, HBO developed the characters in its own TRP-seeking way, only loosely basing it on the deeper discontents of the book, making the girls part real, part archetype, part stereotype. There is no argument that Carrie and her friends did continue to be edgy and self-aware, pioneering television characters in so many ways (though male critics often deny them their due) and the show was one of the most wildly popular ones in the world, making everyone but the author a lot of money. After a point, however it became all too difficult for feminists to disregard the blatant consumerism, insane label-worship, gargantuan proportions of self obsession and the ridiculous body image issues the show engendered.
Make no mistake, I enjoyed watching the episodes but I had to tell myself I was “seeing through” it all the time, or attempting to at least: an altogether uncomfortable sensation in the gut.
Meanwhile, the author
While SATC took its own course between 1998 and 2004, Bushnell wrote several bestselling novels – One Fifth Avenue is perhaps the most popular – and made a lot of money on her own steam, though the world-wide fame often drew from SATC, almost as the other to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie. After disappointing single girls everywhere, she did get married to ballet dancer Charles Askegard. But ten years later, they had an acrimonious divorce. In 2011 and 2012, Bushnell published two YA novels, prequels to the SATC moment, The Carrie Diaries and Summer and the City, intervening into the franchise directly.
The new book
Now, the point of this long preamble is that Bushnell’s latest novel Killing Monica directly works with many of these themes, clearly drawn from certain key moments in her own life. They would be mildly interesting nuggets for the reader – after all authors are always borrowing from their own lives – except that in this case much of what makes Candace Bushnell tick, not just as a writer but a cultural anthropologist of upper class Manhattan, is based on the meat of these experiences.
The protagonist of Killing Monica, Pandemonia James Wallis or Pandy, is a writer (Bushnell’s nickname incidentally is Candy and in an interview she said that the inspiration to this book is actually Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound. See, this is why I like her!)
Now Pandy’s alter-ego is Monica, her hyper popular creation, who she developed in lined notebooks as a child to instruct her sister Hellenor in the mysterious aspects of girlhood. Years later, while Pandy is a struggling writer in NYC, and has her third manuscript turned down by publishers, she recasts Monica as an adult in The Girl’s Guide to Being a Girl:
The Monica franchise
Pandy’s book A Girl’s Guide to Being A Girl becomes a huge success and is soon turned into a booming film franchise. Pandy takes a personal interest in finding an actor to play herself – because, after all, she is Monica – and finally gets SondraBeth Schnowzer, a struggling model with a shady past in Montana, a break.
(Incidentally, in Bushnell’s world Montana represents a peculiar sort of failure. In Lipstick Jungle, she’s written: ‘Nico never wanted to get caught up in the dangerous misapprehension that plagued this town – that you were only someone if you were photographed. She’d seen this happen to too many people in her business. They started thinking they were celebrities themselves, and before you knew it, they were more concerned with being a star than doing the work. And then their concentration started slipping and they got fired and, as had recently happened to a man she knew, had to move to Montana.’)
So SondraBeth Schnowzer becomes the other Monica and also, almost instantly, Pandy’s new best friend and partner in crime. They go about painting the town red as ‘PandaBeth’, doing coke, staying up nights, and generally gadding about until dawn, till one fine day they have a bitter falling out over an actor. Meanwhile, Pandy’s publishers, the studio and the public are ever-hungry for more Monica.
At some point, the cult of Monica begins to overshadow everything about Pandy’s life. As she goes through a wretched divorce with Johnny Balaga, celebrity chef with dubious morals, her agent Henry reports to her the clamour from publishing is that in the new book, Monica too should be getting a divorce.
Though her money woes (nobody would believe that a Manhattan shark like her did not sign a pre-nup – but she didn’t and now she has no money) can be instantly solved by a Monica book, Pandy has had enough of Monica. She wants to write novels about other people and other things – her ancestor Lady Wallis for example – but her publishers just don’t want to hear that PJ Wallis. What they want is interest on the cash cow, full stop.
And then a freak accident suddenly opens up for Pandy the possibility of dealing with all her woes at once. But what about all the people – including her former best friend SondraBeth Schnowzer, her evil soon-to-be ex husband, and the wildly selfish studio executives – who depend on the cult of Monica for their glory? The question is: will they allow it?
To read or not to read?
Though more linear than the other Candace Bushnell books, this, too, is well-plotted. The climax is rather OTT, but one supposes that given how the spoofy nature of the book was made evident from Page One, from the names of the characters for crying out loud, one can’t really complain.
The humour in this book draws from the spoof – and the clever irony that marks some of her other writing is not so much the star here. But most interestingly for me, at the kernel, are extremely important sentiments about the entertainment industry; how the works of artists get completely dwarfed by global corporate giants that barrel away a giant’s share of the profits.
Bushnell’s protagonists (barring a few) are never exactly likeable. This is something I particularly enjoy in her work because very few writers can pull off characters whose fortunes you care about enough to keep turning pages into the wee hours, but whom you would never have wanted to know in real life. There is also a slender sub-plot about Pandy’s long-lost sister which packs in quite a punch too.
Finally, if you are a Candace Bushnell – or a Sex and the City fan – you would certainly enjoy this book, roman a clef-ing through the pages. What’s Google for after all?
Devapriya Roy’s latest book, The Heat and Dust Project, is co-written with husband Saurav Jha. It chronicles an eccentric journey through India on a very very tight budget. She has written two novels in the past: The Vague Woman’s Handbook and The Weight Loss Club.
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Sex and the City: the book
The book, a collection of essays published together in 1997, is truly a groundbreaking text: brittle, honest, clever, and grounded in the socio-cultural Zeitgeist of a specific upper-class, primarily white, 90s-Manhattan moment, flush with the new money of hedge fund salaries or successes in fashion and publishing, and brash in the afterglow of the Washington Consensus of 1989 which made New York City arguably the centre of a newly financialized world order, all funny money and innovation. Over the invisible foundations of this economics, lay the superstructure of Candace Bushnell’s world.
Let’s talk about the book, which, really, ought to be talked about more!
Between 1994 and 1997, while she lived in a studio apartment much like Carrie, slept on a foam mattress when she was too skint to buy a bed, and struggled with finances regularly, Candace Bushnell wrote a radical column in the New York Observer, based on her own experiences – as well as those of her girl-friends – as they negotiated career, sex, it-parties, it-vacations in the East Hamptons, and sometimes love in Manhattan.
When her conservative Connecticut parents announced they were getting a subscription to the Observer, Bushnell invented her alter ego Carrie Bradshaw to hide behind a thin veil of fiction the experiences of their generation. The success of the column got Bushnell a book deal.
In the first chapter of Sex and the City, the book, appear these memorable lines:
Welcome to the Age of Un-Innocence. The glittering lights of Manhattan that served as backdrops for Edith Wharton’s bodice-heaving trysts are still glowing – but the stage is empty. No one has breakfast at Tiffany’s, and no one has affairs to remember – instead, we have breakfast at seven A.M. and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible. How did we get into this mess?
Truman Capote understood our nineties dilemma – the dilemma of Love vs. the Deal – all too well. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Holly Golightly and Paul Varjak were faced with restrictions – he was a kept man, she was a kept woman – but in the end they surmounted them and chose love over money. That doesn’t happen in Manhattan these days. We are all kept men and kept women – by our jobs, by our apartments, and then some of us by the pecking order at Mortimers and the Royalton, by Hamptons beachfront, by front-row Garden tickets – and we like it that way. Self-protection and closing the deal are paramount. Cupid has flown the co-op.
Now this is a powerful original voice; ironic, indulgent, and self-aware all at once. Cynical, true, but also open to infinite shades of vulnerability. Therefore, as I reiterate, there is no ambiguity about my feelings for the book.
So we bring it down to “love and labels”?
The show, however, is a different kettle of fish.
In 1995, Darren Star bought the rights to the book for a lumpsum. And after that, HBO developed the characters in its own TRP-seeking way, only loosely basing it on the deeper discontents of the book, making the girls part real, part archetype, part stereotype. There is no argument that Carrie and her friends did continue to be edgy and self-aware, pioneering television characters in so many ways (though male critics often deny them their due) and the show was one of the most wildly popular ones in the world, making everyone but the author a lot of money. After a point, however it became all too difficult for feminists to disregard the blatant consumerism, insane label-worship, gargantuan proportions of self obsession and the ridiculous body image issues the show engendered.
Make no mistake, I enjoyed watching the episodes but I had to tell myself I was “seeing through” it all the time, or attempting to at least: an altogether uncomfortable sensation in the gut.
Meanwhile, the author
While SATC took its own course between 1998 and 2004, Bushnell wrote several bestselling novels – One Fifth Avenue is perhaps the most popular – and made a lot of money on her own steam, though the world-wide fame often drew from SATC, almost as the other to Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie. After disappointing single girls everywhere, she did get married to ballet dancer Charles Askegard. But ten years later, they had an acrimonious divorce. In 2011 and 2012, Bushnell published two YA novels, prequels to the SATC moment, The Carrie Diaries and Summer and the City, intervening into the franchise directly.
The new book
Now, the point of this long preamble is that Bushnell’s latest novel Killing Monica directly works with many of these themes, clearly drawn from certain key moments in her own life. They would be mildly interesting nuggets for the reader – after all authors are always borrowing from their own lives – except that in this case much of what makes Candace Bushnell tick, not just as a writer but a cultural anthropologist of upper class Manhattan, is based on the meat of these experiences.
The protagonist of Killing Monica, Pandemonia James Wallis or Pandy, is a writer (Bushnell’s nickname incidentally is Candy and in an interview she said that the inspiration to this book is actually Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound. See, this is why I like her!)
Now Pandy’s alter-ego is Monica, her hyper popular creation, who she developed in lined notebooks as a child to instruct her sister Hellenor in the mysterious aspects of girlhood. Years later, while Pandy is a struggling writer in NYC, and has her third manuscript turned down by publishers, she recasts Monica as an adult in The Girl’s Guide to Being a Girl:
Monica was happy. So very, very happy. You looked at her, and suddenly you wanted to be her.
Unless, of course, you were her. Or had once been a version of her – in the past. But now you are frazzled, beaten down, and your skin looks like crap. Your eyes are bloodshot. There is something sticky in your hair.
The Monica franchise
Pandy’s book A Girl’s Guide to Being A Girl becomes a huge success and is soon turned into a booming film franchise. Pandy takes a personal interest in finding an actor to play herself – because, after all, she is Monica – and finally gets SondraBeth Schnowzer, a struggling model with a shady past in Montana, a break.
(Incidentally, in Bushnell’s world Montana represents a peculiar sort of failure. In Lipstick Jungle, she’s written: ‘Nico never wanted to get caught up in the dangerous misapprehension that plagued this town – that you were only someone if you were photographed. She’d seen this happen to too many people in her business. They started thinking they were celebrities themselves, and before you knew it, they were more concerned with being a star than doing the work. And then their concentration started slipping and they got fired and, as had recently happened to a man she knew, had to move to Montana.’)
So SondraBeth Schnowzer becomes the other Monica and also, almost instantly, Pandy’s new best friend and partner in crime. They go about painting the town red as ‘PandaBeth’, doing coke, staying up nights, and generally gadding about until dawn, till one fine day they have a bitter falling out over an actor. Meanwhile, Pandy’s publishers, the studio and the public are ever-hungry for more Monica.
At some point, the cult of Monica begins to overshadow everything about Pandy’s life. As she goes through a wretched divorce with Johnny Balaga, celebrity chef with dubious morals, her agent Henry reports to her the clamour from publishing is that in the new book, Monica too should be getting a divorce.
Though her money woes (nobody would believe that a Manhattan shark like her did not sign a pre-nup – but she didn’t and now she has no money) can be instantly solved by a Monica book, Pandy has had enough of Monica. She wants to write novels about other people and other things – her ancestor Lady Wallis for example – but her publishers just don’t want to hear that PJ Wallis. What they want is interest on the cash cow, full stop.
And then a freak accident suddenly opens up for Pandy the possibility of dealing with all her woes at once. But what about all the people – including her former best friend SondraBeth Schnowzer, her evil soon-to-be ex husband, and the wildly selfish studio executives – who depend on the cult of Monica for their glory? The question is: will they allow it?
To read or not to read?
Though more linear than the other Candace Bushnell books, this, too, is well-plotted. The climax is rather OTT, but one supposes that given how the spoofy nature of the book was made evident from Page One, from the names of the characters for crying out loud, one can’t really complain.
The humour in this book draws from the spoof – and the clever irony that marks some of her other writing is not so much the star here. But most interestingly for me, at the kernel, are extremely important sentiments about the entertainment industry; how the works of artists get completely dwarfed by global corporate giants that barrel away a giant’s share of the profits.
Bushnell’s protagonists (barring a few) are never exactly likeable. This is something I particularly enjoy in her work because very few writers can pull off characters whose fortunes you care about enough to keep turning pages into the wee hours, but whom you would never have wanted to know in real life. There is also a slender sub-plot about Pandy’s long-lost sister which packs in quite a punch too.
Finally, if you are a Candace Bushnell – or a Sex and the City fan – you would certainly enjoy this book, roman a clef-ing through the pages. What’s Google for after all?
Devapriya Roy’s latest book, The Heat and Dust Project, is co-written with husband Saurav Jha. It chronicles an eccentric journey through India on a very very tight budget. She has written two novels in the past: The Vague Woman’s Handbook and The Weight Loss Club.
