Creator of show speaks at Pitt

A largely female audience gathered together to listen to the author of “Sex and the City”… A largely female audience gathered together to listen to the author of “Sex and the City” relate her own life experiences, answer questions and read portions of her new book, “Four Blondes.”

Candace Bushnell wrote regular a column for the New York Observer that became the center of her book and the television show of the same name – “Sex and the City.”

The show has four characters. The main character, Carrie Bradshaw, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, “was my alter-ego in the book,” Bushnell said, done primarily so that her parents wouldn’t know that it was really her having all of Carrie’s experiences.

“I did have a boyfriend who I called Mr. Big in the column,” Bushnell said.

While Bushnell had a lot of friends, the television show focuses on Carrie’s closest three.

“I had a lot of girlfriends, but most of them were like Samantha,” Bushnell said. “We didn’t have any who were like Charlotte.” Samantha is the most promiscuous of the four characters in the book and show, while Charlotte is described as a romantic and wants to be married and have kids. The character of Charlotte was actually created by the producer “to have a different voice” for the show.

Many women say they want to be married, Bushnell said, but “if you really scratch the surface, they don’t.” She said women simply say that they want to be married because that’s what society expects.

But, she said, it has become more acceptable for a woman to really want to be successful. In the 1980s, women began going to college, not “to get an MRS, or Mrs.,” Bushnell said, but to get an education to become successful in a career.

“I knew I wanted to be a writer and I knew I wanted to be in Manhattan,” she said.

So she dropped out of school and went to New York, where she began taking acting classes, which, she said, seemed to make sense to her at the time. Bushnell said she figured that money she could make as an actress could help her in her writing career.

“We were going to have careers, but we were still somehow going to get married,” Bushnell said about the viewpoint of women in the ’80s.

At that same time, “it was really acceptable for a woman to do pretty much whatever she wanted,” Bushnell said. “It wasn’t unusual … to meet a guy and then one week later be living with him.”

The question “can a woman really have sex like a man?” spurred the writing of her “Sex and the City” book, she said. People were actually having panel discussions on the topic, Bushnell said. She added that she feels women can and do have sex like men all the time. As far as her own personal life, Bushnell admits that she’s a “snooper.”

“As soon as a guy leaves … you snoop,” she said. Bushnell suggested looking for a picture of the ex-girlfriend.

She is now currently married to a man 10 years younger than her, she said as the audience applauded. Her sister is also married to a man 10 years younger.

“Maybe it sort of runs in the family,” she added.

Bushnell said she’s been asked to appear on the show a few times in small parts, such as Mr. Big’s wife. But it was always at the last minute and she couldn’t do it.

She worked with the show’s production team for the first two or three years, but doesn’t anymore.

While filming the first episode, “I nearly got kicked off the set for being a back-seat director,” she said.

Her next book, “Trading Up,” is set to release in April in hardcover and September in paperback.