CANDACE BUSHNELL is the critically acclaimed, international bestselling novelist whose first book, Sex and the City, was the basis for the HBO hit series and subsequent blockbuster movie. She is the author of seven novels, including Trading Up, One Fifth Avenue, Lipstick Jungle, and The Carrie Diaries—with the latter two made into popular TV series of the same names. Through her books and television series, Bushnell has influenced and defined two generations of women. She is the winner of the 2006 Matrix Award for books (other winners include Joan Didion and Amy Tan) and a recipient of the Albert Einstein Spirit of Achievement Award. Bushnell grew up in Connecticut, and attended Rice University and New York University. She currently resides in Manhattan and Connecticut. For more information, you can visit CandaceBushnell.com or follow her on social media:
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Reading Group Guide
for
Killing Monica
by
Candace Bushnell
A Conversation with Candace Bushnell
WARNING: Contains spoilers
KILLING MONICA is really a ride: You take us forward in time, then back, then forward, and then you literally push your main character into a sort of alternate reality. Did you set out to construct the book that way or did it evolve over time? What made you decide to have the main character fake her own death?
Usually when I begin a book, I have a fairly good idea of who the characters are, what happens, where the action takes place, and how the book ends. When I started KILLING MONICA, my circumstances were slightly different. My agent said, “Try writing twenty pages of one of the worst days you can imagine,” and so I did. It was about a woman who finds out her ex-husband is about to marry her best friend, then she goes to the bank and is told she can’t get a mortgage so she will have to sell her apartment, and then her dog dies of a heart attack in front of the deli on the corner. So basically she is forced to leave New York and move to the country where she will reinvent herself.
I assumed the book would be some version of “woman leaves the big city for a simpler life, finds a new way to live, rediscovers herself, and ends up with some hot-ish yet age-appropriate-ish man.”
And through this story, she would confront the terrible fears that grip so many women in middle age when we find ourselves having to reinvent ourselves.
Which sounded slightly grim. On the other hand, I wondered what would happen if the story were super comedic instead, almost to the point of absurdity?
And so, in the first few drafts, Pandy’s “country adventures” commenced when she accidently drank a concoction of jimson weed and went on a semi-psychedelic trip in which she believed she was seventeen. Hellenor spoke to Pandy through a crystal ball right after Pandy discovered a dead body in the back of her car. I went through a bunch of crazy, what-if ideas before I landed on the one of Pandy accidentally faking her own death.
You have so much interesting imagery—particularly the moment when the serpent comes out of SondraBeth’s head. Have you noticed that quite a bit of it is pink? The pink cupcake, the pink cotton candy, the pink champagne, the pink ring—and, of course, the book’s very pink cover.
Ah yes, the dilemma of pink! It has so many negative connotations. Now it feels like an ironic color. It sort of has an attitude: “Don’t judge me just because I’m pink!” I have a weakness for pink, especially fuchsia.
While I was writing the book, I started listening to a lot of pop music again and I also discovered Instagram. As a novelist, I find that I rarely analyze photographs or images, but because of Instagram, I’ve started paying a lot more attention to images and wanting to bring that into my writing.
And vice versa: Now I have this crazy idea about making a KILLING MONICA music video.
In it, everyone will be singing “Kill Monica, Please,” while a cloud in the shape of a giant pink cupcake floats over Manhattan.
Besides the color pink on the cover of your books, your name is also often associated with fashion.
Fashion is one of those things that I can momentarily become obsessed by—not necessarily in a shopping, acquiring kind of way—but from a costuming perspective. My aesthetic goes in the direction of big and showy, and I do love imagining the costumes my characters are wearing in a scene. One of my favorites in KILLING MONICA is that black reverse-bride wedding gown contraption with metal panels that snap open as she lifts her arms.
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sp; Because my comic aesthetic runs toward the absurd, I also love to poke fun at fashion. That’s why we see that behind the scenes, SondraBeth can’t actually move in that dress.
With the exception of parties and events, I would describe my day-to-day fashion style as “sporty lounge.” In other words, it’s mostly lounge-y, but if I suddenly have the urge to ride a bike, I don’t have to spend a lot of time changing. For instance, if I’m wearing slippers with rubber soles, I find they are just as useful as sneakers.
“I was in love with every single one of those men I dated. Don’t you understand? That’s the problem. I think I’m in love with them and then all of a sudden, that ‘in love’ feeling goes away, and there’s no getting it back…I’m like Romeo. I’m in love with being in love.” Why did you change Pandy into the “male” Romeo character?
To me it’s a wry statement about our human behavior and how we have a propensity to keep making the same mistakes over and over again even though we all know better!
Pandy is actually decrying the fact that she’s like Romeo. She’s trying to explain why falling in love—and especially falling in love with a man like Jonny—will be “bad” for her, given the evidence of her romantic past. And yet, in an action paralleled later on in the book, when no one “believes” that Pandy is Pandy—no one “believes” that Pandy could possibly not want to fall in love and live happily ever after. I think it’s an analogy for how society shapes women, insisting that we must all want the same thing, and when we say that we don’t, people always seem surprised.