Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell was 'startled' by And Just Like That decisions: 'That's not my story'

Candace Bushnell couldn't help but wonder: Is this the same Carrie Bradshaw she created in her '90s sex and relationships column?

The author of the Sex and the City newspaper column and book that inspired the hit series, who also served on its writing team for the first two seasons, admitted she was caught off guard by its HBO Max follow-up, And Just Like That, in a New Yorker story published this week.

"I'm really startled by a lot of the decisions made in the reboot," Bushnell said. "You know, it's a television product, done with Michael Patrick King and Sarah Jessica Parker, who have both worked with HBO a lot in the past. HBO decided to put this franchise back into their hands for a variety of reasons, and this is what they came up with."

When asked if she saw herself in the reboot, she replied, "Not at all. I mean, Carrie Bradshaw ended up being a quirky woman who married a really rich guy. And that's not my story, or any of my friends' stories. But TV has its own logic."

King, the show's creator, however, told EW in December that all the pieces lined up for SATC's return.

"I wouldn't have come back and risked everything that we risked by bringing these characters back if I didn't have a really bold, strong narrative as a writer… If I didn't have an actress like Sarah Jessica Parker, who I knew would be devastatingly good in it," he said.

Bushnell explained that her disconnect with her alter ego began long before the 2021 revival. She stopped recognizing Carrie as herself in the original show's third season.

"When the character of Carrie sleeps with Mr. Big after he's married to somebody else — that's when I felt like the character's becoming something other," Bushnell said.

Still, Bushnell thought one change in the reboot was more indicative of its source material: its racial diversity. After criticism that Sex and the City's largely white cast was not representative of New York City's population, And Just Like That added BIPOC characters like Professor Nya Wallace and the controversial nonbinary love interest Che Diaz.

"Was my own world only white people? No, of course not — that's just not New York," Bushnell said. "But, for the show, that was how people cast things then, it was the way that people in TV were. I don't think anyone was consciously trying to be nasty about it; they just really didn't think."

Having released her latest book, Is There Still Sex in the City?, in 2019 and starred in a one-woman Broadway show of the same name that was cut short because of the pandemic, Bushnell is eyeing her next projects. Plans to adapt the novel into a TV pilot fell apart, also due to the pandemic, but she hopes to rework it.

For now, Bushnell reminisces about the days when Sex and the City aligned with her own experiences, recalling an episode she recently watched from the first season.

"All of them were going into a building, Carrie was smoking, and they had that attitude we used to have in the '90s in New York: 'We are single women in our 30s, so don't f--- with us, dudes, because guess what? So many people have f---ed with us,'" Bushnell said. "I think the first two seasons really captured that joy of not having to follow the rules."

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