Candace Bushnell: Queen of the jungle

Candace Bushnell, creator of the alpha females of Sex and the City, is a keen observer of the species in her chosen urban habitat. But despite the glossy subjects, she takes her craft very seriously indeed.

CANDACE BUSHNELL can't wait to take off her clothes. Not that the American who brought us Sex and the City is planning to indulge in wild sex in the city of London, she's simply longing to get back into the "uniform" of comfortable jeans, T-shirt, long-sleeve cashmere sweater and flip-flops in which she lives and works most days.

"This is soo-oo-o not me," says the sleek, sophisticated blonde, indicating her cunningly cut Ferragamo dress, which is the colour of clotted cream, worn with a low-slung, burnished leather belt which would sit on her hips if she had any.

Her bare legs are tanned dark gold and she's sporting dusky pink, diamante-trimmed heels. She is also wearing a gorgeous turquoise necklace the same colour as her eyes, plus diamond hoops in her ears that match her wedding ring, while on the middle finger of her right hand, a huge rose-pink diamond winks whenever she lifts a hand up to sweep her choppy, shoulder-length hair away from her fragilely pretty features.

It's not usual, of course, to begin an interview with a bestselling novelist with a description of the author's wardrobe, but Bushnell is no ordinary writer – she's Jane Austen with a martini or perhaps Jonathan Swift on rollerblades, take your pick. She is every inch as glamorous and feminine as her alpha female characters in Sex and the City and Lipstick Jungle, itself now a TV series, starring Brooke Shields.

Connecticut-born Bushnell is an executive producer on the show, which is on its second series in the US. A canny move, since Sex and the City certainly did not make her rich: she sold the rights for $60,000 and it's "highly unlikely" she'll ever see another dime from it, she says.

Nonetheless, that was a small fortune at the time – she was in her thirties but had been living in penury, borrowing money to pay the rent and sleeping on a slab of foam.

Although it didn't make her rich, what Sex and the City did was make candid Bushnell famous. We're talking in the restaurant of one of London's chicest boutique hotels, where Bushnell drinks copious quantities of tea and it seems that everyone in the room feels the need to negotiate the awkward corner where we are sitting. Bushnell's theory is that it's because we are both so small and don't take up much space. I think it's because everyone wants to see the bodacious Bushnell up close and personal, presumably to check whether she's channelling Carrie and speaking only in rhetorical questions.

Which she isn't. Instead, she is telling me how seriously she takes the novelist's craft: "I so wish I could crack the soliloquy in the novel, the way Philip Roth, say, can. If only I could find a way to write a whole page that would take you inside the mind of a character and move the plot forward."

She is the writer who turned confessional journalism into an art form – Sex and the City began life as a column in the New York Observer, written under the pseudonym Carrie Bradshaw, before Bushnell transformed it into a book. Currently she is writing The Carrie Diaries, two novels set in her heroine's teenage years in high school, which are due to come out in 2010.

Bushnell remains the femme fatale of female fiction, although she is on the cusp of 50, celebrating her half century on 1 December. Cheerfully Botoxed ("It works" she exclaims, her forehead as smooth as a baby's bottom), she says that she won't be having plastic surgery: "I don't understand the need to reinvent yourself. although I'm not judgmental about it.

"In any case, I'm just thrilled that I'm about to be 50. I'm very content with my life now, the happiest I've ever been in my life, so middle age doesn't concern me."

Promoting her latest opus, One Fifth Avenue, Bushnell may be dressed for success but she can also tell you a lot about an address for success. In real life, One Fifth Avenue is a 27-storey Art Deco apartment block, a piece of New York's most prime real estate and an iconic, eminently desirable Manhattan building, which is currently home to actors Jessica Lange and Sam Shepard, among others. Brad Pitt and Gwyneth Paltrow once lived there, and last August Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton sold two apartments there for a combined asking price of $8.75 million.

Bushnell and her husband, the New York City Ballet principal dancer Charles Askegard – who is ten years her junior – live a block away in a smaller Greenwich Village building, in a two-bedroomed pad that she has filled with old and glittery things, while the bathroom is "papered" with dustjackets of Bushnell's books.

Her two antiques, including a Louis XVI sofa bought from friend and fellow novelist Jay McInerney, who lives across the street, are probably worth nothing, she insists. But she loves her little apartment so much – they have a house in Connecticut, too, where she gardens and is planning a pool – she reckons she'll be there until her dying day.

In Bushnell's fictional world, One Fifth Avenue is inhabited by fabulously named women – Schiffer Diamond, Mindy Gooch, Annalisa Rice, Enid Merle and Lola Fabrikant – whose high-end stories of sex, shopping and scheming have prompted some critics to compare it to Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. "It is a swan song for the age of avarice as it passes," wrote one reviewer.

Certainly, the book is peopled by venal, greedy, often deeply unlikeable characters (especially an obscenely rich hedge-fund manager) in relentless pursuit of shedloads of money, love, sex and revenge. So does Bushnell see herself as a satirist who unerringly taps into the female zeitgeist? Or is she a kick-ass feminist, who in her five blockbusting novels has encouraged women to live life for themselves, to make their own mark in Manhattan's Lipstick Jungle?

"It always amazes me that my books turn out to be so satirical and of the moment," she says. "I guess the book is oddly timely. I wanted to explore the world of power, money and envy surrounding incredibly rich people, like hedge-fund managers. I'm an observer and I keep my eyes and ears open. It comes from a desire to attempt to capture the times we live in, although sometimes I can't believe how monstrous the fictional characters I create are, but really they are types. They're not based on real people.

"As for feminism, I don't know whether I kick ass. But we sure still need feminism. Look at what happened to Hillary (Clinton, frequently criticised during her presidential primary campaign].

"The truth is, sexism exists. The things people say about women are shocking – yes, even Sarah Palin – but they are tolerated. You can call a woman terrible things and no-one bats an eyelash. That's why we still need to be feminists."

A self-confessed erstwhile party girl, Bushnell dated well into her forties. Her twenties were sometimes awful, she confesses. She spent many long, lonely years searching for romance, endlessly dating more than a few "toxic bachelors", including the real-life Mr Big, Bob Guccione, Jnr, and British venture capitalist Stephen Morris.

But those days are over.

Six-and-a-half years ago she married Askegard, after meeting him at a $3,000-a-plate charity dinner for New York City Ballet. After five weeks they were discussing marriage, and after eight weeks they wed on a Nantucket beach, where she wore roses in her hair. "We're just crazy about each other," she says.

"It was a long wait, but I waited for the right person and it was sure worth the wait. And I'd urge other women to do the same."

• One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell is out now, published by Little, Brown, priced at £12.99.


By and about women: three classic bonkbusters

HOLLYWOOD WIVES by Jackie Collins

WHEN her first novel, The World is Full of Married Men, was published in 1979 it caused outrage with its graphic sexual content, but the then 42-year-old author Collins was undeterred. Hollywood Wives (1983) was insanely successful, entering the New York Times bestseller list in the top spot and selling an alleged 15 million since then. Described as a 'scandalous exposé' of Tinseltown behind closed doors, it was near-the-knuckle fiction which made her as famous as her actress sister, Joan. None of her 25 novels has ever gone out of print and the British-born Hollywood resident, widowed since 1992 but with 'a man for every season' as she once put it, has sold some 400 million books.

SCRUPLES by Judith Krantz

Fat, miserable Bostonian teenager Wilhelmina Hunnewell Winthrop is shipped off to Paris to become a lady under the tutelage of her refined French aunt. At 18 she reinvents herself in New York as a whip-thin beauty, takes a secretarial job and promptly marries her much older boss. After his death 12 years later, sexy widow Billy Ikehorn – as rich as Croesus but lonely and reclusive – opens a chic boutique in Beverly Hills, becoming a celebrated frock-pusher and unapologetic sexual adventuress. After many spectacular shags, she finds love again with a movie mogul. Ivy League-educated New Yorker Krantz published this, her first novel, in 1978 when she was 50. It reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

LACE by Shirley Conran

"Which one of you bitches is my mother?" is the killer line from this 1984 bestseller. It is uttered by Lili, a young actress and erstwhile porn star who was born illegitimate to a pupil at an exclusive Swiss school and adopted as an infant. The three candidates for motherhood – whose glamorous lives Lili threatens to ruin unless she gets her answer – are lifelong friends Pagan, Judy and Maxine, who made a pact of secrecy over the child's parentage and whose racy love lives are recalled as the mystery unfolds. This stonking 600-pager by the ex-wife of Habitat founder Sir Terence Conran was her first novel. It was published in 1982, seven years after Superwoman, her self-help manual for the feminist age, which sold on the back of its author's inspired declaration: "Life is too short to stuff a mushroom."