Candace Bushnell on the Real Sex and the City, Money, and the Advice She Gives Young Women Now

There is a particular kind of conversation that can only happen between someone who lived a cultural moment and someone who inherited it. On this episode of Booked, Blonde & Busy, Olivia Ponton hosts Candace Bushnell, the writer whose New York Observer column became Sex and the City, and whose Carrie Bradshaw became shorthand for a whole way of being single in a big city. Ponton came up on TikTok and Instagram; Bushnell built her name in a New York that existed before either platform. The gap between them is the point.

New York before the phones

Bushnell’s vantage is what makes her worth listening to nearly thirty years after the book. She describes a nightlife and a dating culture that ran on physical presence: being in the room, being seen, working a city that had not yet been flattened into a feed. For a host whose generation conducts courtship through screenshots and read receipts, the contrast lands as something more useful than nostalgia. It is a reminder that the mechanics of attention have changed even if the wanting hasn’t.

The advice is the money

The headline takeaway is unsentimental, and Bushnell does not soften it. Pressed on what she would tell young women today, she points away from romance and toward financial independence: get the money. It is a striking thing to hear from the person most associated with the fantasy of the search for love, and it reframes the entire Sex and the City legacy. The show was always, underneath the shoes and the brunches, about women trying to build lives on their own terms. Bushnell strips the gloss off and says the quiet part directly.

A second life on BookTok

The other thread is generational rediscovery. Sex and the City is being found again by readers who were not alive when it premiered, much of it driven by BookTok and the same creator ecosystem Ponton works in. Bushnell talks about watching a new audience meet Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha decades later, and about keeping the material alive herself through a one-woman stage show. It is a case study in how a story survives a platform shift, not by chasing the algorithm, but by being specific enough that each new generation reads itself into it.

That is also the throughline of the show itself. Booked, Blonde & Busy uses a book as the door into a bigger conversation, and here the conversation is about how women have navigated money, attention, and ambition across two very different eras of New York. It is a genuinely smart pairing, and a reminder that the most interesting interviews happen when the host is curious about a world she didn’t grow up in.

Listen to the full conversation on Booked, Blonde & Busy.