In anticipation of Sex and The City 2, I  picked up The Carrie Diaries at the Hong Kong Airport a couple weeks ago.  After finishing it, I threw the book away, thinking I had been duped by a Chinese counterfeit publishing company.

The book was sooooo bad, it was almost painful.  The plot is about Carrie’s teenage years before Sex and The City, when she is mapping her way through the high school social scene in Connecticut. Her mother has passed away and her father is raising her with two sisters.

When Carrie works at Vogue in Season 4 of the HBO series, an older male mentor named Julian exposes her “daddy issues”.  He asks her about how her father would feel if she quit in the middle of writing an article and she responds, “My father wouldn’t have a lot to say about quitting.  He quit my mother and me when I was little”.   She then explains that he left when she was five and she has no idea why, that it was never said.  Julian analyzes,  ”Your father leaves with all the answers and you spend you life asking questions about men”.

Candace Bushnell, What the F***with The Carrie Diaries?

The plot is not even consistent with the show and it was written after the show and the first movie were complete.  The writing is lacking the wit and sophistication that made her such a zeitgeist columnist and superstar.  I felt like the book had been written by an intern.  Even the photo of the author on the inside jacket seems odd because it is an image of Candace Bushnell as a teenager. Maybe my expectations were too high- I mean I absolutely loved One Fifth Avenue.   But now I’ve lowered my expectations for Sex and the City 2, especially after seeing the trailers.  Seriously did you see she’s wearing a “J’Adore Dior” tee shirt when she reunites with Aidan in Abu Dabi?  I mean Carrie, please!!!!