I came across an interesting Twitter thread about how sometimes the book is much worse than the film, and that this often happens with cult films. Among those mentioned was Sex and the City, which surprised me a bit, because if you've read the book, you should know that the TV series, or rather the first episodes, is only slightly based on a collection of these essays, and that the tone and essence of the book and the TV series are generally at different poles. To put it crudely, there is simply no adaptation here.
I remember being surprised when I read the book. I was also surprised that what I thought was a very good attempt at a really vivid, poignant and clever statement had been turned, not without the help of Candace Bushnell!, into an iconic but still pretentious and artificial piece of work that fell into what the book seemed to condemn.
I even wrote a little post at the time where I briefly noted my observations.
It's a fundamentally different story. No, you can't compare it to American Psycho, but the novel had enough space to grow into something like that, and that's why you should take the text mainly in the direction of an attacking and denouncing satire of a tiny and so much desired society, but definitely not in the direction of a romantic story.
It's not a story of extraordinary friendship, support and solidarity between women. It is not a feminist story. Carrie, Candace's alter ego and therefore the protagonist of the novel, could hardly be the protagonist of the series, even comedically, because she is an utterly pathetic, selfish, opportunistic thing, completely devoid of any sense of humour or self-irony. This woman is an alcoholic and a drug addict who, like everyone else, is looking for a way to score big.
Mr Big is her big prize. There is no love in her, only desire, a desire for comfort. The comfort of the bed, the pillow, the air conditioning in the apartment, the maid to clean up after her, the private jet, the white mink coat. A completely empty person who doesn't know how to love or be friends. There is nothing about friendship in this book. Nothing at all!
And by the way, there is supposedly no sex between Carrie and Mr Big (nor in the TV series! Did anyone notice?). In such a revealing sex book, sex between these characters is suddenly not described, and so it's as if it doesn't exist. But there's nothing revolutionary about the sex in the novel, quite the opposite. Sex in the book is such a very patriarchal exchange of the self as a body for profit and security, only the women are fooled, as always.
I don't know if there's any point in recommending the book, maybe it's all outdated, maybe the whole New York thing will be hard for you to get through, as it was for me, because I didn't get the point of New York at all.... Maybe the point is that it's such a small world of consumers for whom the rest of the world is slave labour. I don't know. It just really surprised me that the book and the TV series are not connected in any way and tell completely opposite stories.
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