Confessions of a Recovering Wannabe Carrie Bradshaw

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I remember watching the last episode of Sex and the City. It was the second semester of my sophomore year of college, the dead of winter in New England. My three roommates and I tromped over to a neighboring suite, where friends of ours had ponied up for a flat-screen and premium cable. There were about 10 girls perched around the small common room, wearing pajamas and slippers and probably zit cream, and settling in for one final outing with the show’s quartet of no-longer-single friends. It was the end of an era; then again, we had our lives ahead of us, and Sex and the City made what came next feel less like a dreary slog, more like a glamorous party.

This memory is both hazy and certain: The latter because I know exactly who was in that room, where we were all sitting, and what our university-branded sweats looked like; the former because I have no clue how I felt about Sex and the City’s ending—the writers’ decision, for example, to unravel Carrie’s Parisian fantasy future with the needy, self-centered Russian art star Aleksandr Petrovsky (Mikhail Baryshnikov) and deliver her back into the clutches of the elusive, toxic financier Mr. Big (Chris Noth). Perhaps my failure of recollection is a testament to all the drinks—cocktails, the show taught us to call them—that I’ve downed between now and then. Perhaps it’s simply that I didn’t yet know how indelibly these characters and their choices would shape my own behavior over the next decade.

Nearly 20 years earlier, John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club taught us that we weren’t stuck with our high school selves, that the identities we defaulted to—the nerd, the jock, the spaz, the queen bee, the juvenile delinquent—were fungible constructs. But Sex and the City was built on archetypes. And in 2004, most 20-year-old women did not want to be Mirandas (smart, cynical, ambitious, abrasive) or Charlottes (ditzy, sweet, old-fashioned, pretty) or even Samanthas (licentious, power hungry, slightly narcissistic). We wanted to be Carries: quirky, effervescent, scrappy, sexy, funny, equal parts Dorothy Parker and Holly Golightly, the manic pixie dream girl before that was even a thing. Identifying with Carrie might have been the off-kilter choice if HBO hadn’t rendered it the obvious one. She was narrator and star. She appealed to our inner underdog; like her, we would each be the fabulous antiheroine of our own journey into idiosyncratic selfhood.

Or, in my case: the fabulous anti-heroine of my own journey into Carrie’s idiosyncratic selfhood. Looking back, it was her fictional life that I was expressly and unimaginatively emulating when I moved to New York City after graduation, when I pursued a low-paying job in the book publishing industry and began scouring the clearance racks of downtown boutiques in search of something resembling personal style. Carrie lived in what by TV standards was meant to be a modest apartment—an Upper East Side junior one-bedroom with an unrealistically spacious kitchen, bathroom, and closet—so I sought my own: an under-market, tiny, dark, sixth-floor walk-up studio on the bad side of a good block. I adored it. When I imagined what it was to a be a writer—the end goal of that book publishing job, though I was too green to realize I’d entered the wrong side of the industry for bylines—it was Carrie’s questionable work ethic that I had in mind. I didn’t have the balls to be a sex columnist, but I could imagine a future as a journalist, tapping out intermittent flurries of inspiration between costume changes and cosmopolitans. I bought Sex and the City on DVD and spent my spare time not writing but bingeing entire seasons, comforted by familiar story lines; the warmth of the friendships; the way, like so much television, the show erased life’s background noise.

Then there was the attempt to emulate Carrie’s racier endeavors. I made friends with party girls who drank till 3:00 a.m. on weekdays; booked reservations at just-opened, scene-y restaurants; and shopped at stores I couldn’t afford. I couldn’t actually afford anything: not the vodka sodas we guzzled like water, nor the meals (for which I pregamed by eating rice and beans alone in my apartment), nor my rent-stabilized apartment. We met men at bars and—to paraphrase Carrie’s real-life alter ego, Candace Bushnell, author of the New York Observer column on which the show was based—we had affairs that were better off not remembered. Sadly I remember them, as does my mid-aughts Gchat record. Carrie chased the emotionally unavailable Big, and I did the same with my own white whale of a not-quite boyfriend, a reticent, slightly older foreigner whose affections—or perhaps just his ardor—I courted unflaggingly for the better part of my middle 20s. Never did I feel more like a Carrie than the time I went over to his apartment late at night and drew his naked portrait on a chalkboard wall he’d painted above his dining table, on which he posed for me like an odalisque (the show modeled that sex should be, if not always good, then at least interesting). I was in it, supposedly, for the stories, though I was too busy dating other men on the side—my attempt not to get attached—ever to write them down. When we broke up the first time, it was because he refused to help me move. The second time it was because he didn’t want to be my date to my sister’s wedding. That wasn’t the end of it. Like Carrie and Big, we stayed in each other’s lives for years. Unlike Carrie and Big, we’re now married to other people.

I’m not the only one who felt this alarming level of affinity. In fact, it’s amazing how similar two stories can be when the narrators are following the exact same script. The 20th anniversary of Sex and the City’s premiere this week has occasioned similar reminiscences, one of them a particularly bitter takedown that recently made the rounds on Twitter by erstwhile sex columnist Julia Allison, who blames the show for leading her into a life of fame-seeking, dating very bad men, living beyond her means, and ruining her reputation. “Truth be told,” she writes, “I wish I had never heard of SATC. I’m sure there are worse role models, but, for me, it did permanent and measurable damage to my psyche that I’m still cleaning up.” (Novelist Jami Attenberg perhaps summed it up best in a tweet: “Oh, my God, could you imagine blaming all your bad life choices on a TV show?”)

Photo: Courtesy of Simon & Schuster

In a new book, entertainment writer Jennifer Keishin Armstrong (Seinfeldia) shares a happier tale of the show’s outsize influence on her life: After moving from the suburbs of Chicago to northern New Jersey with a boyfriend who would soon become a fiancé, she took a job as a magazine assistant in post-9/11 New York, made a new crop of single friends, and explored Manhattan with the show “as her oracle.” It “showed me that not only was I still young, I was also under no obligation to get married at all,” she writes. Soon enough she’d dumped her partner—he was wrong for her—and set off on her own. “Sex and the City had ended the previous year. My Sex and the City had just begun.”

Armstrong’s book is called Sex and the City and Us, though a more accurate title might be Sex and the City and Them. Aside from her intro, it’s shorter on personal anecdotes and cultural criticism, longer on oral history, tracing the show’s genesis after Darren Star, one of the forces behind hits like Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place (also the flop Central Park West), optioned the TV rights to Bushnell’s very buzzy 1996 anthology of her columns. Star sold the project to HBO as “a modern R-rated version of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” In choosing the cable channel—based in Manhattan—over a broadcast network, and in casting Broadway actresses like Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie and Cynthia Nixon as Miranda, he preserved the project’s innate New York-iness, distinguishing Sex and the City, which filmed on location in the hip bars and clubs and restaurants its characters frequented, from other so-called New York shows—Friends, Seinfeld—that actually filmed in Los Angeles. (Over the course of its six seasons, the series’s production would go from minor spectacle to major tourist attraction—and major annoyance to New Yorkers.)

Star brought on writer Michael Patrick King to help adapt Bushnell’s version of Carrie and her cohorts for the masses. If prevailing notions of the single woman were shaped by the sad sack Cathy comic strip—and Cathy’s latter-day, funnier British reincarnation, Bridget JonesSex and the City reframed singleness as a viable and even “enviable” choice, “not merely okay” but “something special, an independent phase worth preserving until the perfect partner came along.” (I recently rewatched all six seasons and was struck anew by how bold, if not radical, the characters’ choices are: In my mid-thirties now—a couple years older than Carrie, Charlotte, and Miranda at the outset of season one— I know only a handful of people who haven’t defaulted to the traditional narrative. All those aforementioned party girls are now married with kids.)

On the show, being single did not entail social isolation or anything like it. Sex and the City’s emphasis on chosen family—and near total exclusion of its characters’ biological families—reflected the influence of its two primary architects, Star and King, both gay men. (After they hired industry newbie Michael Green, King would joke that this show about four women in their 30s was being written by “two queens and a 20-year-old.”) Female writers and producers like Amy B. Harris, Jenny Bicks, Cindy Chupack, Liz Tuccillo, Julie Rottenberg, and Elisa Zuritsky were added to the mix (Bicks, Armstrong reports, once had to diagram female genitalia on a dry-erase board to get Star and King up to speed). The author seems particularly interested in the effect working on Sex and the City had on these women’s lives, and how their writers’ room became a petri dish for the debates Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte, and Samantha would later have over brunch on-screen. The writers became like Bushnell, “professional daters of sorts,” obliged to turn their personal trials and tribulations into fodder for their characters (or, more positively: “Suddenly being single had transformed from a liability to an asset”).

Armstrong’s book is in-depth and insightful, with a fangirl’s reverence for the nitty-gritty of the creative process. She treads delicately around thornier topics, like rumors that have long dogged the series of a rift between Cattrall and her costars, but takes seriously criticisms of Sex and the City’s shortcomings: Racial diversity, for example, was woefully lacking; the representation of LGBT characters can be cringe-worthy (so was Charlotte’s Jewish conversion plotline); and the show’s vision of “choice feminism” reflected the significant privilege of its characters (who can forget the episode in which Charlotte quits her job ahead of trying to get pregnant, senses Miranda’s dismay, and shrieks, “I choose my choice!”). If, on the one hand, the show “changed the way we thought about women and sex” and “demonstrated that life-changing love comes in forms besides heterosexual marriage and nuclear family,” on the other it also “served as a weekly commercial for white ladies doing what they want as the ultimate liberation.”

It was also an over-the-top, unbridled celebration of consumerism. The ladies of Sex and the City shop, eat, drink, and shop some more with the same verve and prerogative as they enjoy and seek out sex. Charlotte has inherited wealth; Samantha and Miranda, high-pressure, high-earning jobs. Carrie has neither, and her glitzy lifestyle was troublesomely divorced from reality. (It doesn’t help that most of the people writing about her are journalists who know just how hard it is to scrape by in our industry.) “What did this mean to those of us trying to live the Sex and the City life?” Armstrong asks. “It represented an extreme fantasy in which freelance newspaper columnists can afford uptown apartments . . . and a closet full of Manolo Blahniks; in which professional women have enough free time and funds to consume cupcakes, cosmopolitans, designer clothes, cosmetic procedures, yoga classes, and bikini waxes; in which life is a series of fabulous parties, fashion shows, and drinks with wealthy men. In other words, we couldn’t help but wonder: Why can’t I eat this cupcake, drink this cosmo, and be a size zero like Sarah Jessica Parker? And where did my money go?”

Not even Bushnell lived a life like Carrie’s. At the time she scored her Observer column, the writer was 35, single, and sleeping on a friend’s pull-out couch. In fact, beyond character names and a few sexual conundrums borrowed for the show’s early episodes, Bushnell’s book and the series derived from it don’t much overlap. Rereading her writing, I was struck by its extreme remoteness and cynicism (so, reports Armstrong, was Cattrall, who initially passed on the role of Samantha, finding the source material too depressing). Sex in the original Sex and the City is more calculated than fun. Intimate, loving friendship doesn’t seem to exist; certainly there’s no version of the tight-knit foursome that Star and King invented for the small screen. Bushnell’s columns are more writerly—she’s got a precise ear for dialogue and a cutting, wry tone (I couldn’t help but wonder what she must have made of Carrie’s grating signature turn of phrase)—less intent on glamorizing her freewheeling moneyed Manhattan milieu than sending it up. The people who populate her rarefied world come across as soulless at worst, latently miserable at best, more Anna Delvey than something to aspire to. In fact, in terms of mood, Bushnell’s column more closely resembles Girls—the anti–Sex and the City for its warts-and-all lens onto emerging adulthood in New York—than the glittery show that bears its name.

So Sex and the City was a lovely, imperfect, myopic dream invented, like most television shows, in a writers’ room. Why did we, especially those of us who might have known better, expect otherwise? To live in downtown Manhattan in the first decade of the 21st century was to live in the show’s graveyard. I once glimpsed Bushnell across the room at a book party. More than once I ran into a grizzled, very un-Big-like Chris Noth at my local Gristedes. Sarah Jessica Parker lived just a few blocks from my apartment, near the brownstone that stood in for her Upper East Side townhouse in exterior shots, a chain cordoning off its stoop from the trespassing of overeager tourists. Evidence that the whole thing was make-believe was all around us. Some of us—me included—simply chose to ignore those facts. It was more fun to prolong the fantasy.

In 2013, The New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum wrote a piece examining why Sex and the City was frequently excluded from conversations about the golden age of television. “Even as The Sopranos has ascended to TV’s Mt. Olympus, the reputation of Sex and the City has shrunk and faded, like some tragic dry-clean-only dress tossed into a decade-long hot cycle,” she wrote. “By the show’s 15-year anniversary, this year, we fans had trained ourselves to downgrade the show to a guilty pleasure.” (As Armstrong puts it: “Yesterday, feminist pioneers; today, basic bitches,” though she also points out that misogynistic distaste for the series has existed from the beginning—read Tom Shales’s early Washington Post reviews and prepare to be shocked and appalled.) Five years later, Sex and the City backlash seems in danger of downgrading the show yet again: from guilty pleasure to dangerously misleading and bad for you (“Like candy,” Allison writes. “In the moment, it feels good to eat it, but afterward, you feel sick”).

But only if you buy into that. Like Allison, I’m a recovering Carrie clone. Unlike Allison, I’m not doling out blame (like most other people I know, it turns out I’m more of a Miranda anyway: doomed/blessed to be my uptight, stressed-out, ambitious, outspoken, workaholic self even when it isn’t that adorable). I figured out eventually what it actually means to be a writer: writing. Basically all the time. Even when you really don’t want to. If I take anything from Sex and the City now, it’s that I should aspire to treat my friendships with the same sacred care that I bring to my romantic relationship. (Also that I can wear really bizarre outfits in the name of fashion, because YOLO?)

Reading Allison’s essay I was reminded of Meghan Daum’s much, much better essay, “My Misspent Youth,” which ran in The New Yorker in October 1999, a few months after the second season of Sex and the City aired. Daum’s piece has nothing to do with the show (passages in which she takes aim at those who refer to their female friends as “girlfriends” and at the word chic make me think perhaps she was not a fan). It does, though, have to do with her fixation on a fantasy of a very specific New York lifestyle, the quest for which eventually led to her downfall. At 17, driving into the city from her home in New Jersey to run an errand with her father, she glimpsed the interior of an apartment that so bedazzled her, “from that moment on, everything I did, every decision I made, every college applied to or not applied to, every job taken or not taken, was based on an unwavering determination to live in a prewar, oak-floored apartment, on or at least in the immediate vicinity of 104th Street and West End Avenue.” That desire, she explains, was predicated on a misconception, born of watching Woody Allen movies, that “oak floors were located exclusively in New York City.” Her dream apartment was basically Mia Farrow’s place in Hannah and Her Sisters. “To me, this kind of space did not connote wealth. These were places where the paint was peeling and the rugs were frayed, places where smart people sat around drinking gin and tonics, having interesting conversations, and living, according to my logic, in an authentic way. As far as I was concerned at 17, rich was something else entirely.” In fact, it wasn’t: The apartment used in that film wasn’t “the urban version of middle-class digs,” but rather Farrow’s actual, real-life apartment, i.e., the home of a fabulously wealthy person. And the consuming need to live in such a place eventually leads Daum off a financial cliff. At the end of the essay she’s $60,000 in debt and striking out for a new life in Lincoln, Nebraska.

Is Hannah and Her Sisters dangerously misleading because Daum allowed herself to be dangerously misled? No. It’s probably more accurate to say that very young people—and that includes those in their 20s—have a tendency to get carried away, and quite often don’t know what they don’t know.

Actually, I think there’s a Sex and the City episode about that. Watch it. It really holds up.