Candace Bushnell

Candace Bushnell, born December 1, 1958, is an American author, journalist, and television producer whose work grew out of New York City social life in the late twentieth century. She was born in Glastonbury, Connecticut, to Calvin L. Bushnell and Camille Salonia. Her father was one of the inventors of the air-cooled hydrogen fuel cell used in the Apollo space missions in the 1960s, and her mother was of Italian descent. Bushnell attended Rice University and New York University, then moved to New York in the late 1970s, where she frequented Studio 54.

At 19, Bushnell moved to New York City and sold a children’s story to Simon & Schuster, though it was never published. She kept writing and worked for years as a freelance journalist for various publications while struggling to make ends meet. In 1993, she began writing for The New York Observer. The next year, she created the humorous column “Sex and the City,” drawing on her own dating experiences and those of her friends. The column ran from 1994 to 1996 and became the work most closely associated with her name.

In 1997, those columns were collected in the anthology Sex and the City, which soon became the basis for the HBO series of the same name. The show aired from 1998 to 2004 and starred Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw, a socially active New York City sex and lifestyles columnist. Bushnell has said Carrie was her alter ego. The series later entered syndication and led to two films, Sex and the City in 2008 and Sex and the City 2 in 2010. A third film was announced in 2016, then canceled and replaced by the sequel miniseries And Just Like That… on HBO Max.

Bushnell followed that success with a series of bestselling novels, including 4 Blondes in 2001, Trading Up in 2003, Lipstick Jungle in 2005, One Fifth Avenue in 2008, The Carrie Diaries in 2010, and Summer and the City in 2011. Lipstick Jungle was adapted for NBC and aired from 2008 to 2009, starring Brooke Shields. The Carrie Diaries was adapted for The CW and aired from 2013 to 2014. Bushnell also served as a judge on the CBS reality show Wickedly Perfect, hosted a Sirius Satellite Radio talk show called “Sex, Success and Sensibility,” and wrote the comedic web series The Broadroom.

Her writing was shaped by observation: friends, dates, work, money, marriage, divorce, and the social codes of Manhattan. In 1995, she met publishing executive Ron Galotti, who became the inspiration for Mr. Big. From 2002 to 2012, she was married to Charles Askegard, a principal dancer with the New York City Ballet. After their divorce, she described being single as hard and “a bit heroic.” That mix of wit and bluntness is also present in one of her lines: “Life gives you lots of chances to screw up, which means you have just as many chances to get it right.” Her words still connect because they treat reinvention not as a slogan, but as part of ordinary life.