THE CANDACE BUSHNELL INTERVIEW:

TRADING UP

McDonald: The obligatory question: Trading Up is your first novel and is centered on Janey Wilcox, from Four Blondes. What brought you back to Janey?

Bushnell: I think she was the most popular character in Four Blondes. You know the character of Janey Wilcox is not meant to particularly be a likeable character, but there certainly are aspects to her, and things that she does and ways that she thinks that women secretly think, but would never want to admit. It’s that sort of manipulative, conniving kind of approach to life.

McDonald: If Janey were a male character, the novel would maybe be described as a kind of "rogue’s" or "rake’s progress." What’s your verdict on Janey, a year out? What kind of person is she?

Bushnell: The funny thing about the character of Janey Wilcox is that I’ve tried to get rid of her quite a few times. I think at the end of Four Blondes, something was going to happen to her and then I felt sorry for her. So I made her the Victoria’s Secret model. At the end of this book, I was thinking she was going to die in a plane crash, or, she was going to go crazy. Seriously, she was going to be sitting on a plane to L.A. going (here Candace simulates sounds of crazed incoherence) — you know, having totally lost it. But then, actually, my publisher felt sorry for her and said, "No, we can’t do that to Janey." The funny thing about that is that it probably mirrors a real life situation of this kind of character, where she is the kind of woman where you’ve just had it with her drama, then, at the last minute, somebody comes along and buys her story and saves her. So, in a way, Selden — who is her husband — says to her, "You know, you’re like a virus." She is kind of like a virus. It’s something that I find kind of interesting. I certainly have met my share of Janey Wilcoxes.

McDonald: I ran across an interview in which you stated the novel is a kind of exploration about whether a woman can be "a trollop and a feminist." What were your own conclusions?

Bushnell: The interesting thing about women like Janey is that they really do think that they are feminists. For them, being a feminist is getting one up on men. It’s that idea of, "Well men do these things to women," or "Men use women," so turnabout is fair play. There’s an element of truth to that in terms of how one might think.

McDonald: Near the end of Trading Up, you incorporate a quote from George Bernard Shaw, "Beauty is all very well at first sight; but who ever looks at it when it has been in the house for three days?"

Bushnell: Yeah, beauty is all very well and good until it’s been in the house for three days, then it’s not so beautiful anymore. That’s actually one of my favorite quotes.

McDonald: Is that a kind of unofficial or dislocated epigraph for your novel?

Bushnell: The thing to me that is fun about Janey Wilcox is she is a woman who men will always be attracted to. She’s the kind of woman about whom other women say, "Hey, that woman is bad news" and men say, "Oh no, she’s just misunderstood."

McDonald: Yeah, well, we can be like that where stunningly good-looking women are involved.

Bushnell: Exactly. One of the big weaknesses of the male sex is just being completely unable to see through beauty. And, of course, Janey uses that.

McDonald: The novel ends with the possibility of Janey engaged in some role in Hollywood. Are you contemplating some latter-day Day of the Locust?

Bushnell: Umm. I’m actually not. I’m in the middle of writing another book, and actually Selden is in the next book. I had a couple of thoughts: Number one, Janey comes back to New York. Number two, it’s several years later and she’s successful and Patty and Digger die in a small plane crash and they have a daughter and Janey has to take care of the daughter. I really wanted to write about New York again. I’m not sure whether Janey is going to make an appearance, but Selden is actually one of the characters and so far Janey hasn’t made an appearance although there are some rumors about Selden: "Oh, he was married to this kind of crazy woman…."

McDonald: This is the book that will be out in 2005?

Bushnell: Yeah.

McDonald: In that same interview, you commented that you were originally going to make Janey a prostitute, but instead made her a lingerie model. For those who’ve read some things you’ve written about models, and for some characters in the book, that’s a pretty subtle distinction. Have you heard anything from Victoria’s Secret about your novel and it’s connection to this unsavory character of yours?

Bushnell: The phrase "Victoria’s Secret model" is a certain type. It’s bigger than it is…in a way, it’s become part of the lexicon. I actually think it has become part of the lexicon. "Victoria’s Secret Model" — is used not to refer specifically to Victoria’s Secret models but to a type of perfect-looking woman with a perfect figure who is super sexy. It’s a type that, let’s face it, we all wouldn’t mind looking like for at least a couple of hours, right? Sort of like a Vargas girl summons up a type of beauty of a certain time.

McDonald: Many people seem to tend to want to read your novels as roman à clefs. Trading Up appeared last year in hardcover. In the ensuing months, have there been any jaw-dropping speculations about particular characters, and presumed real-life counterparts?

Bushnell: There supposedly was some speculation about who Janey was: She was not based on any particular model and I thought that was kind of amusing because I don’t actually know any super models personally. I’ve met a couple of them, once or twice, but I don’t actually know any super models personally. One thing I’ve noticed with this book. Going out in New York — I’ve never written a book where so many people who are in the scene of going out to parties and dinner parties and movie openings in New York come up to me and say that they’ve read the book and they love the book. To them, they say, it seems so real. While nobody has said, "Oh, that person is so and so," they feel like they know these people. These are the people they see out every night. I heard from someone who was on a plane and they heard a couple arguing. The guy was saying, "I am not that guy!" And the woman was saying, "You are! You’re just like him…you are that guy!" So the person who told me this peeked over the side and they were arguing over Trading Up.

McDonald: The novel appeared in hardcover in 2003, but is set in 2000. The Trade Center Towers are still standing, and mentioned in Trading Up. Did you deliberately set your book in a pre 9/11 world?

Bushnell: I started writing the book right before 9/11. I wasn’t actually in New York when it happened. I was in the countryside of England working on the book. It was just, of course, a shocking and horrifying time. The panic of trying to get through to friends and family and not being able to get through…. You know, I think pre-9/11, there was definitely a feeling in New York that people were getting richer and richer and that the money people had in the late-90s was bigger than the money that people had in the 1980s. That’s something that people don’t talk about, but there was a feeling in New York that life was just going to keep going on and on and on and nothing was ever going to change. The book is about that time and it is deliberately pre-9/11.

McDonald: What’s the mood like in the circles you move in in New York after 9/11? What effect did the attacks have on the kinds of people you write about in your books? Is it going to find its way into your writing?

Bushnell: It’s something that nobody will ever forget. People also feel as though they’re going to be more friendly. They’re going to tell their friends that they love them. We’re going to tell our acquaintances that we love them. There’s a little more acceptance and it seems there is a little less back-biting. There’s a feeling of, "Hey, life’s too short — let’s make the most of the moments we have." I think there’s a cautious optimism, but there’s also a realization that this could happen again and it could happen any day.

McDonald: The city is a standing target. Probably THE target.

Bushnell: Yeah. It’s not something people talk about all the time, but it is something that everybody is very aware of.

McDonald: There’s a tendency to compare your work to Jane Austen and Edith Wharton in terms of its social satire. But it is so sardonic, you might be better to include Twain, or Swift or Ambrose Bierce in that list.

Bushnell: Actually, I was looking at the (UK) cover of Sex and the City and there is a quote from, I think it was the Telegraph, "Jane Austen with a martini or perhaps Jonathan Swift on rollerblades."

McDonald: It also reminded me of Moll Flanders, in a way. As an avowed reader of the classics, was there a particular classic you were swinging for?

Bushnell: Certainly a book that I love and that I find so interesting is Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. That’s not one of her most famous books. It’s about a woman named Undine Sprague who comes to New York with her parents. Basically, her parents are wealthy in their small town in the Midwest. And Undine is determined to socially get ahead. She has an instinct for it, and for destroying people’s lives. Her first husband ends up killing himself over her. She sells her second husband’s family’s tapestries that have been in the family for hundreds of years. She has no regard for the past, for tradition. It’s that kind of character who is fairly ruthless about getting ahead who is interesting. Today, America is such a country of new, new, new that I think you’d have a hard time convincing readers that something that’s been in the family for generations is really of any value. But of course Edith Wharton was writing about the traditional European values that were brought over by early American families and being eroded.

McDonald: Right, the loss wouldn’t seem as profound. Some descendant would peddle the stuff on eBay without a second thought.

Bushnell: That’s really a story — and that book in particular is so well structured and so well done. That’s something that one just doesn’t tend to see in novels now — the craft of novel writing and of having a plot. Having a book that people will read through to the end. Most of the so-called novels that I read — they’re over halfway or two-thirds of the way through. There is nothing left. I always think about that story and I think if one were to do it today — and I might do this for my next book — it would be like a young girl, a Britney Spears kind of story. That would probably be the way to do that book now.

McDonald: You began your career as a journalist, and, those who know you from your books might be surprised at some of the stories you’ve covered. …teen runaways, migrant workers. Are you ever tempted to do some more stories along these lines now that your very by-line could bring them more attention?

Bushnell: You know, one of the reasons why I stopped doing those sorts of stories — I would go and I would spend three weeks because I was writing for a magazine, not a newspaper, and you can get that kind of time. What happens is that you become friends with these people. They’ve never seen anything like you before…you’re paying attention to them and you become friends with them. You do genuinely like them, but when the story is over, that’s it, you’re gone. And they don’t really understand that. I just felt like that was wrong. I felt like morally I couldn’t do that. You get phone calls from them: "Can you help me, can you send money, can we come visit you?" It’s like well, "You know, I live in a one-room apartment in New York City and sleep on a fold-out couch. I can’t help you — I want to, but I can’t."

McDonald: You’ve described Sex and the City as fiction written as journalism. Any impulse to engage in more writing of that kind?

Bushnell: I see myself doing more novels. I have a book that should be out in 2005. I have a contract for two more novels with Hyperion. So that will pretty much take care of at least the next five years, unless I get to be a really really speedy writer…and don’t have to go on book tours.

McDonald: Trading Up is a very long book. What are your writing habits like? Do you have a target word count for a day’s work?

Bushnell: I try to write ten pages a day, five days a week. That’s kind of hard. It usually ends up being about 40 pages a week. I stick to it. I get up, I get to work, and I don’t really leave the computer until I’ve written ten pages. It’s a lot of discipline and it also means when I’m doing that, I go to my house in the country and I don’t go out at night. I’m alone. A lot of things that people do in their day-to-day life — I don’t’ do any of that. Sometimes I’ll go for two weeks without seeing any friends.

McDonald: Really that isolation of the writer….

Bushnell: It’s a cliché, but unfortunately it works. And, I don’t really mind it, to tell you the truth.

McDonald: You were in your mid-30s when the book Sex and the City was published. It is credited with spawning its own genre that now includes several novels written by 20-somethings. I read something in which you asserted it takes 20 years to learn to write well. In retrospect, are you glad you were somewhat older than some of your purported followers when you published your first book?

Bushnell: When I was in my 20s, I probably started five novels and wrote 50 to 100 pages of each and put them aside. When I was in my 20s, which was in the 1980s, nobody was interested in publishing anything that was about the life of a 20-something woman living in New York. Publishers really felt there was no market for it. I ended up being a journalist because I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to pay my rent. I’m glad to have had that experience. You learn a lot of discipline being a journalist, and, hah, they don’t really care if you don’t feel like doing it. You have to do it or there is going to be a blank page in the magazine or newspaper and someone is going to be really mad. I do think that writing is a craft and it does take you about 20 years, I think. It’s a commitment. Brett Easton Ellis said something really interesting which is true: People in their 20s don’t see beginnings, middles and ends. They see where they are and things that happen to them, but they don’t have the perspective of how it fits into a bigger picture. Brett said that it wasn’t until he got to be in his mid-30s that he understood that things have beginnings, middles and ends.

McDonald: You live in an eternal present?

Bushnell: Yeah. A present of, "Gosh, life is just happening to me. All these things are happening to me that aren’t fair, that are out of my control."

McDonald: At age 19, you wrote a children’s book for Simon & Schuster.

Bushnell: I did.

McDonald: Was that ever published?

Bushnell: It wasn’t published, but I got paid a thousand dollars. It was for some little series that they had that was called Dress the Bear. It was supposed to be like Pat the Bunny, but they published one and then decided to discontinue it because I guess people wanted to Pat the Bunny, but they didn’t want to Dress the Bear.

McDonald: It’s all sounding very euphemistic. With Patricia Cornwell, Michael Chabon, Ridley Pearson and Elmore Leonard all taking a swing at children’s books, why not one from Candace Bushnell?

Bushnell: I wanted to be a children’s book writer when I was a kid.

McDonald: You transcended that?

Bushnell: (Laughing) Well, I kind of feel like I write children’s books for adults. Even when I was in my 20s I wrote a story about a kid who turns into a TV. This, of course, was before cable. Actually, one publisher said, "This reads like you wrote it in three days." And I was like, "I did!"

McDonald: Proudly.

Bushnell: Exactly.

McDonald: I can make some presumptions about the audiences who attend your appearances in New York and throughout the east. What kind of crowds do you draw in the Midwest?

Bushnell: I see, I would say, Sex and the City-type women. And they’re everywhere. They tend to be bright, articulate, interested in life. Tend to be well-dressed. Mothers come with their teenage daughters.

McDonald: Do you get many men?

Bushnell: I do get a few men. Sometimes husbands. The boyfriends who are always looking a l-i-t-t-l-e s-c-a-r-e-d…. Honestly, I tend to get great female audiences. They tend to wear their good shoes, too. My audiences tend be very well shod, frankly. I hope that doesn’t sound bad, but they tend to be the kinds of women who, you know, they make an effort.

McDonald: Do you feel a need to make an effort to live up to some image that you sense they want from you?

Bushnell: Yeah, I do. I dress up. I wear my Manolos. For instance, I’m going out tonight. I would dress pretty much the way I would dress for a night out in New York.

McDonald: You wrote two new chapters for the paperback release of Sex and the City a few years ago. What was the catalyst for those additions?

Bushnell: Actually, the book was published in September of 1996, and I was still writing the column for a few months after that, so they were actually columns that didn’t make it into the first edition of the book. And, of course, by that time, I’d broken up with the real Mr. Big. When I finished the columns that went into the book, Mr. Big and I were still together. So the original ending of Sex and the City is that Carrie and Mr. Big are still together. Then, in the time between the book getting published, we broke up and I wrote a couple of more.

— © C. McDonald, June 2004

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