Art & Creativity Quote by Candace Bushnell

Bushnell is doing two things at once: reclaiming authorship and politely surrendering to pop culture’s gravitational pull. Calling Carrie her “alter ego” is a power move, a reminder that Sex and the City began as a writer’s eye, not a network’s product. Alter ego doesn’t mean autobiography so much as permission: Carrie is the sharpened, stylized instrument Bushnell used to test-drive desire, ambition, and urban mythology with a columnist’s detachment.

Then comes the careful boundary-setting. “In real life... we don’t look anything alike” is less about cheekbones than about ownership. The HBO adaptation turned Sarah Jessica Parker’s face into the franchise’s default, collapsing character, performer, and author into one glossy silhouette. Bushnell counters with the most durable kind of difference: the body. You can’t argue with “we don’t look alike.”

But she concedes where it’s culturally inevitable: voice. “People do say that we sound alike” nods to the eerie ventriloquism of adaptation, where a character’s cadence migrates into an actor’s signature and then back onto the creator. It’s also a sly admission that what the public wants isn’t factual accuracy; it’s coherence. They want the author to “match” the myth.

Ending on “adorable” and “very funny” reads like smart diplomacy. She praises Parker without kneeling to her, framing her as charm and comic timing rather than the definitive Carrie. The subtext: yes, the show borrowed my sensibility; no, you can’t completely replace the writer with the star.