Who

Party girl-turned-columnist-turned-author, Candace Bushnell is the creator—and real-life version—of Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw.

Backstory

After a middle-class Connecticut childhood (her father was an actual rocket scientist), Bushnell dropped out of Rice University at 18 and headed straight for New York City, where she became a Studio 54 fixture and dated Shaft director Gordon Parks, who was nearly 40 years her senior. When her acting ambitions didn't pan out, she worked as a freelance contributor to magazines like Mademoiselle and Vogue and continued to party, the two occupations culminating—around 18 years after she landed in Manhattan—in a fateful offer from Peter Kaplan to write for the New York Observer.

The paper's "Sex and the City" column, a thinly-veiled chronicle of Bushnell and her circle's exploits, only ran from 1994 to 1996, but the resulting HBO series, produced by Darren Star and Michael Patrick King, changed the cultural landscape irrevocably and guaranteed Bushnell's bankability as a writer, prompting Hyperion to stump up a seven-figure advance for her novels Trading Up (2003) and Lipstick Jungle (2006). These days Bushnell also hosts a weekly Sirius Radio show, "Sex, Success and Sensibility."

Of note

Bushnell is credited with/blamed for spawning an entire cottage industry of books in which young city women shop for shoes, drink cocktails, and moan about men's caddishness. But the legions of pale SATC imitators generally lacked the element that made Bushnell successful in the first place—the voyeuristic pleasure of knowing that her writing captures her real life, and that her characters are directly imported from Manhattan's upper social echelon. Among the many recognizable figures: her former beau Ron Galotti (or Mr. Big), who was publisher of Vogue in the '90s; Jay McInerney, who appears both on the page and the screen as toxic bachelor Capote Duncan; Princess Cecilia in the novella quartet 4 Blondes, an obvious portrait of the late Carolyn Bessette Kennedy; and Victory Ford, the forty-something fashion magnate of Lipstick Jungle, who is assumed to be based on Bushnell's friend Cynthia Rowley.

Grudge

The only person who's ever complained about having their life appropriated on SATC is Bushnell's ex-manager Clifford Streit, whose TV manifestation, Stanford Blatch, Streit declared "the most pathetic gay image ever shown on the screen." Streit sued Bushnell in 2005—or six years after the show went on the air—for money supposedly owed to him from Sex and the City syndication. Bushnell also had a falling out with producer Darren Star, whose series for ABC, Cashmere Mafia, supposedly ripped off NBC's TV version of Bushnell's novel Lipstick Jungle, which Star had originally been slated to produce (although Bushnell had the last laugh, as Cashmere Mafia had inferior ratings and was axed, whereas Lipstick Jungle has survived into a second season).

Personal

After running through more than a few toxic bachelors, including Bob Guccione Jr. and British venture capitalist Stephen Morris, at the age of 43 Bushnell married Charles Askegaard, a ballet dancer ten years her junior. They live in the Village with their dog and have a country house in Kent, Connecticut.