Candace Bushnell has spent thirty years chronicling how women date, fight, fail, and occasionally triumph in New York City. Her advice to the next generation sounds nothing like Carrie Bradshaw's voiceover.
"Don't bother," Bushnell tells Ponton when asked what she'd say to Gen Z about dating. She follows with something closer to a mission statement: "Get the money."
Bushnell means it. She wishes she'd told herself the same thing at twenty-five, back when ambition in a woman was a social liability and buying your own house was a fantasy. Instead, she watched friends derail their careers for the wrong guy, then another wrong guy, then realized the problem was structural. "There's so many young women who feel like, 'Oh, I just picked the wrong person.' No, that's not true. You don't pick the wrong person. That's what the majority of men are like."
Men rank relationships fifth, she says. Women rank them first.
Bushnell has a theory, built from decades of interviews and late-night reporting at clubs that no longer exist. Women list relationships as priority one, followed by children and friends. Men? Themselves, sex, career. A relationship lands at number five if you're lucky. "I think that that makes it a little bit difficult," Bushnell says, with the dry understatement of someone who turned that difficulty into a franchise.
The gap explains why so many great women in New York can't find great men to marry them. That was the question that launched Sex and the City in 1996, and Bushnell thinks the answer hasn't improved. Women changed. Men didn't. The mismatch persists, now amplified by social media, where women can scroll through an endless catalog of mediocrity and convince themselves the problem is their taste.
She wrote Sex and the City hungover, on deadline, with real people's quotes.
The book that became the show was a collection of columns Bushnell filed weekly for the New York Observer. Circulation: 50,000. "The 50,000 people you want to be reading something," someone told her. The columns were social anthropology, not memoir. She reported. She gathered people to argue about a topic. She shaped what they said into something darker and funnier than most novelists would risk.
Some chapters were fiction, written on days she was too hungover to leave the house. Most were real. "These are real people who said really said these things," Bushnell insists. "These are real attitudes that people have." She didn't care if characters were unlikeable. She had her audience. They loved it because it didn't lie.
The publicists Lizzie Grubman, Lara Shriftman, and a woman Bushnell only knew as Ali begged her to write about them. They were 25, single, convinced it was worse than being 35 and single. One of their dates brought a baby bunny to an apartment and let it pee on the couch. That story made it into the show as "Valley of the Twenty-Something Girls," filmed on Staten Island because the Hamptons were too far.
Yes, she dated the senator. No, he didn't pee on her.
Bushnell's one-woman show includes a game called Real or Not Real. Carrie dated a senator who peed on her in the shower. Bushnell dated Al D'Amato, caught with him in Palm Beach in the late '90s when Palm Beach was deeply uncool. Her Italian grandmother loved him. He did not pee on her. "My version's better," Bushnell says.
She did sleep with a Calvin Klein underwear model. Not the one in episode two. A different one. His name was Michael Bergin. She was 33, writing the column, living the material.
The trophy boyfriend era has arrived, and Bushnell wants in.
Ponton floats the idea of Gen Z flipping the script: women as breadwinners, men as arm candy on brand trips. Bushnell lights up. "I'm so into that idea." She's trying to figure it out, she says, but the shaming is real. A woman who makes more money or commands more attention than her partner still gets side-eye. "I don't think it should be that way."
Bushnell points to the Sex and the City episode where Miranda wants to buy Steve a suit and he refuses, wounded. If the roles were reversed, buying a dress would be chivalry. Buying a suit is emasculation. The asymmetry is the problem. Men get insecure. Women get told their success is unfeminine. The script hasn't updated.
BookTok terrifies her, so she doesn't look.
Bushnell loves that people are reading and talking about books. She thinks it's fantastic that Sex and the City touches a new generation every few years, usually in college dorms where women watch together and realize they don't have to marry the first guy who shows interest. But she won't look at BookTok. "It's like looking at what people write on Amazon," she says. "I don't want to get that feeling of like, 'Oh, you hate me.'"
She knows someone out there is posting "I hate Sex and the City. It's not like the TV show." She'd rather not see it. The book is darker, more cynical, more honest than the show ever was. It's an artifact of late-'90s New York, when everyone smoked two packs a night, did a couple grams of coke, drank twenty drinks, and showed up to work the next day. "It was a different time," Bushnell says.
She wishes she'd been more selfish.
If Bushnell could talk to her younger self, she wouldn't say "find a better guy" or "don't waste time on romance." She'd say: "Explore that ambitious side of yourself." Make money. Buy a house. Stop waiting for a man to provide the things you can provide for yourself. "The wrong relationship can really derail you," she says. Most men are like that. Accept it or opt out.
She's not sure she wants to date anymore. At this point, what's the point? She went on a date with a 94-year-old who promised her own room in Palm Beach, "but eventually you'll come into my room." She said no. The senior age players, she calls them. They all want sex. It never stops. "That was New York," Bushnell says. "Of course, that was 40 years ago. I'm old."
She's still collecting stories, though. Last night at Carnegie Hall, she filmed the flowers and the boxes and sent them to her writing partner for the Fifth Avenue adaptation. The flowers should be huge, she said. People should have to look around them. It's comedic. She's working on the pilot. She's not writing another book. Books take six hours a day, six days a week, maybe ten days in a row before you can take a break. She's done that. She wants to do something else.
"Get the money" isn't a joke. It's the thing she wishes someone had told her when she was 25, single, ambitious, and convinced that admitting ambition would make her unlovable. It didn't. The ambition made Sex and the City. The rest was just material.