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Writer Candace Bushnell, coined the Dorothy Parker of our time, released her latest tome, Is There Still Sex in the City?, earlier this month to rave reviews. Over lunch at Nicole Miller’s North Haven abode, the Sag Harbor resident dishes on turning 60 and sets the record straight on how she really feels about not having children. BY EDDIE ROCHE PHOTOGRAPHY BY HANNAH TURNER-HARTS
How did the book-launch lunch come about? Nicole brought it up because she’s amazing at entertaining. It’s like down to the smallest detail. I could never do that. Your new book is fiction, but is it in some ways an autobiography? No, not really. Some things in it are autobiographical, so that’s why we’re calling it “auto-fiction.” The characters are definitely fiction, because they are meant to be sort of any woman. There are lots of things in the book that happened to me, and there are things that happened to me that I gave to other characters. It’s all kind of mixed up. There could’ve been 20 characters…but you can’t have 20 characters in a book! What’s the gist of it? In some ways, it’s about a passage of time that happened to me in my fifties. I call it “middle-aged madness.” I got divorced, and my life changed. I wanted different things, and I didn’t even want to date. I had all these other girlfriends who were also getting divorced and in a time of transition. What happened after the “happily ever after”? No one talks about that! You may think that you’ve found your happily ever after, but it doesn’t mean that you’re going to have it forever. It requires you to reinvent yourself a little bit, which is actually a great thing. For a lot of people in their fifties or early sixties, a parent is going to die. Statistically, that is what’s going to happen. So on top of change, there are also just life passages, like loss. It makes it tricky. The book is about a group of women going through this passage together. Did you ever consider making this a Carrie Bradshaw story? Bringing Carrie to this age? No. I think that character is too big. Carrie Bradshaw
is in a tutu in a beer commercial now. That’s just not a real woman, and I mean that in the nicest way. She’s become like a superhero. So I think it would be hard. I would go back in time, maybe. But in a different form. The sexual tales of women in their fifties and sixties are not often discussed in our culture. Although the ladies of The Golden Girls had very active sex lives back in the ’80s! The Golden Girls seemed like they were 80! They had those women in their fifties acting really old. Women in their fifties now are not old. It’s a different group of women, and it’s a different time. They were Sex and the City women 20, 25 years ago. They had a career and a family. But it’s like, “Hey, there’s another chapter.” You draw inspiration from your friends. How do they react when their antics are revisited in your pages? I take stories from all different kinds of places, but
nobody has come up to me and said, “That’s so-andso.” What does happen is that people will come up to me and tell me something and say, “Hey, you should write about this.” Also, remember I’ve been working on this book for a couple of years, so when people ask me what I’m working on, I say, “I’m working on this book about mid-life, and it has these kind of characters in it.” People always say to me, “Oh, my God, that’s my sister,” and they’ll tell a story and ask me to use it. People always say, “You’ve never heard this story,” but I’m like, “Try me!” Do you like the promotional part of being an author? It’s a very different part of being an author. It has certainly changed so much. Now, [publishers] want you to be on Instagram. Some young writers have told me that a publisher is interested in their work, but they won’t publish them until they have 10,000 Instagram followers. That seems like a ridiculous
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