Candace Bushnell's 'The Carrie Diaries':Not a girl, not yet a woman

MANILA, Philippines - You don’t want to peak in high school. If you do, the rest of your life is a disaster.” So writes a teenage Carrie Bradshaw in The Carrie Diaries. Marketed as a young adult novel, the book introduces us to Candace Bushnell’s semi-autobiographical character, most famous for being the newspaper columnist with a covetous shoe collection from the HBO TV series Sex and The City. And it’s a prequel, taking place before she moves to the city and before she has all that sex.

Carrie — or Bradley as her high school friends call her — is in her last year of high school and her schedule is a mess. She’s got swim-meets and practices, deadlines for the school paper, college applications, best friends that don’t get along, two younger sisters who keep breaking the rules, an overemotional widower father, a persistent suitor named George and dates with her boyfriend Sebastian (who apparently went out first with Donna LaDonna, the most popular girl in school).

The book serves up what every high school story should have: there’s envy, humiliation, betrayal, heartbreak, scandal and revenge. She talks about how the popular crowd is mindless and shallow but you can also sense that she just wants to be accepted. It also gives you an idea of how Carrie Bradshaw got into writing and the struggles she had to go through to see if it was truly her passion. “Who am I supposed to be? Just be yourself. But who am I?” she asks herself before a college interview. This book also serves as a backgrounder of why she becomes cynical towards men and the feminist leanings in her subsequent writing.

If you are looking for something as crazy as an episode of Sex and The City then you may be disappointed. There is very little mention of sex or not as much as you’re accustomed to. It’s very PG-13 to say the least. Still you have to remember that this book is filed under “young adult” and what would high school Carrie have to say about sex anyway when she’s never done it?

It was interesting enough for me to finish in one sitting, though I didn’t enjoy that there were so many characters or that Bushnell’s lack of description made them less memorable. The book is really helped by the fact that the lead character is now a famous fashion icon — otherwise it would be nothing great. Bushnell deserves credit, though, for not making Carrie sound like the self-centered insecure teenager she is. Not many authors can do that (see: Stephenie Meyer’s very annoying Bella Swan). It might not be a must-read for the general reader but if you’re a Sex and The City fan, you will want to read about the virgin that was Carrie Bradshaw.

* * *

Available in Fully Booked.