Book Recommendations for Sex and the City Characters (and Fans!)

A Valentine's Day episode of this newsletter!

I really do like television. When I was a kid (in the 2000s), I drank the “TV rots your brain” Kool-Aid like crazy. I was proud of the fact that unlike some people¹, I read actual books. In my mind, one could only be a Virtuous Book Person or a Brainless TV Acolyte². As an adult, though, I love good TV. I love spending years getting to know a group of ragtag onscreen characters. I love cheering them on when they’re doing well and yelling at them when they perpetuate their worst tendencies for plot reasons. Beautiful sets, impractically fashionable costumes, clever scripts, actors really doing the hell out of their jobs for years at a time — these are the pleasures I deprived myself of in my youth and have come to enjoy now.

This means that I love Sex and the City. I grew to love it in the months after it was dropped on Netflix last year, in which a friend and I embarked upon watching it together, calling each other to tune in to the season finales and bridge a three-thousand-mile distance. Prior to this, I was under the false impression, mostly inculcated in me by men older than myself, that this was a bad, trashy, silly show, and that worst of all, it was girly³. Now, I know that it is superbly acted and bitingly, smartly written.

But it needs more books.

For all that Sex and the City is about people who read, books are not a significant part of its universe. We see Carrie, an avowed writer, reading Martin Amis a few times, and Miranda professes a lawyerly love for presidential biographies. But books are not a feature of the show’s landscape as they are in something like Gilmore Girls. Carrie doesn’t talk about what she reads; she just reads it, and we don’t even get a view of the cover most of the time⁴.

This is where I come in! I have recommendations for all four of the main characters. Even the ones who probably haven’t picked up a book since high school (*cough*Samantha*cough*).

Carrie Bradshaw

Surely the person who’s a writer by profession would be the person least in need of a reading recommendation, right? But maybe the opposite is true. I have a feeling Carrie has read a fair number of classics already (even if we don’t see her doing that). I’ll give her something more in the vein of what she does herself: relationships and advice.

What is she reading?? We do not know!!

Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn reads very much like what would happen if Carrie took those “I couldn’t help but wonder” monologues, expanded upon them, and sought out the perspectives of people who’d been through more than she had. Through interviews with therapists, actors, podcasters, and bereaved siblings, Conversations on Love leaves no stone unturned on the subject of love, whether romantic, familial, or between friends. Carrie never seems to know what she thinks love is, and she could use this book to help her think it through.

I’d also recommend Dear Dolly, a collection of Dolly Alderton’s advice columns from the Sunday Times. Dolly Alderton is about the closest thing we have to Carrie Bradshaw in real life⁵, in the good ways at least. Carrie can be awfully closed-minded sometimes and I think she could stand to learn the art of responding empathetically to situations that challenge her biases! I recommend both this and Conversations on Love for her on audiobook, both because they’re good audiobooks and because if SATC had come out in the 2010s Carrie would for SURE have had a line about how audiobooks aren’t reading!

Also, A Room with a View by E. M. Forster, because I just finished it and it’s the kind of thing I could see Carrie paging through on her bed.

Miranda Hobbes

My mission here is to give Miranda a break from her weighty nonfiction reads that will still give her brain something to chew on. Miranda is a brilliant lawyer and she probably cares about good writing, but as we saw with her soapy period piece obsession in the show, drama makes her WEAK.

I’m going to recommend Miranda two of my favorites: first, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley, which has just the right mix of social commentary, zingy lines, and sci-fi shenanigans to satisfy her. She can go feral over the romance between a buttoned-up Victorian explorer and an intensely detail-oriented time travel agent, but she won’t feel guilty because she’s also reading about colonization! Win-win.

Miranda looks like she’s listening but really she’s fantasizing about time-traveling explorer Graham Gore!

My other recommendation is Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, because I just KNOW Miranda watches SNL every Saturday night with Steve, and because Sally Milz and Miranda are almost the same person. Remember that absolutely heartbreaking episode where Miranda throws away that smoking hot detective because she thinks he’s too attractive to actually like her? She’ll either love Sally or hate her, toss the book out the window, and spend two hours on the phone with her therapist because it’s too real. Probably the latter. She can send me the bill.

Charlotte York

I defy the Internet and all Charlotte nay-sayers therein: I love her and I don’t care who knows it. And I think, despite what we may see within the show, that she is a reader. She’d probably be a book club reader, because Charlotte has so much internalized overachieving perfectionism that she couldn’t just read a book; she has to join some sort of group and read partly for her own edification. And she’d do brilliantly with a schedule to keep herself honest and a whole group of fellow book club moms to herd into finishing a novel.

Look at my girl getting it in those reading glasses!

That’s why I’m going to recommend a book I personally didn’t finish, but that Charlotte would love: Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami, translated to English by Sam Bett and David Boyd (I didn’t finish it for what I suspect are translation reasons. It’s weird to me that this book so clearly about womanhood was translated by men but I digress!). Charlotte, with her fertility struggles, would deeply relate to one of the protagonists’ journey to have a child late in life, and she would find the commentary around the other protagonist’s breast enhancement surgery prime fodder for book club discussion. I also think it would be good for her to read about a society, social class, and relationship to sex different from her own. One main character is asexual and Charlotte would probably be the most understanding of the main four about that!⁶

Also, because Charlotte is an art lover, I’m going to throw in two gorgeous historical novels about women in paintings: The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier. Again, prime book club fodder! Charlotte will definitely win book club, which is a thing that is possible to do.

Samantha Jones

You were wondering how I’d possibly make it through this one, weren’t you? I’ll admit, I had to think a while about a book that Samantha Jones, an unabashed non-reader if I ever saw one, would like. (I do think she’d love the smut renaissance we’re seeing on TikTok, though.)

“Who is this? And why did you call during my reading time?” Samantha definitely did not say, but I’m pretending she did

So, in the grand tradition of desperate bibliophiles striving to win over reluctant readers, I will recommend a graphic novel tailored to my subject’s interest. Embroideries by Marjane Satrapi of Persepolis fame, a hodgepodge of sex stories from Iranian women of the author’s acquaintance, is both a short, quick read and centers on Samantha’s favorite topics: sex and juicy gossip. If she likes this, I’d hand her Persepolis next. Satrapi’s defiance of oppressive political regimes and sexual harassment make her a woman after Samantha’s own heart. Also, Samantha did not make smart choices in the UAE in SATC 2 and I want her to educate herself!

Books for fans of SATC

Here are some more reads that YOU might like if you like this show!

• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Sadiya Hartman: SATC is such an overwhelmingly white and wealthy show, and it’s good to examine the lives of women of a different demographic and time. This history of Black women in cities in the early 20th century is both fascinating and written more lyrically than many novels. Hartman describes both the hardships and the joys of these women’s lives, and in this field the latter is definitely rarer!

• The Best of Everything by Rona Jaffe: a slightly soapy yet sensitive portrayal of four young professional women in 1950s New York. “Before Sex and the City, there was this novel” is even part of the blurb. Nora Ephron called this book trashy in Heartburn but we are just going to have to concede that she might not know everything!

• Come as You Are by Emily Nagoski: As groundbreaking as SATC was, it sometimes (ehh … often) upheld gendered and regressive ideas of sexuality, especially in Carrie’s columns. Nagoski’s book on women’s sexuality breaks down a lot of those myths and offers solid, nonjudgmental advice. (This is also really good on audio!)

• The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue: O’Donoghue is the host of Sentimental Garbage, one of my favorite podcasts (they have a wonderful series on Sex and the City), and this novel feels very in tune with SATC in its examination of relationships and the mistakes we make as we try to navigate them.

What books would you recommend to these characters?

1. Sure, there are some people who don’t read any books at all, and probably they should. But I read a lot of books, and there are plenty of things I don’t do that I probably should. Like regularly cleaning my microwave. Which I only did today because I overflowed a mug of hot chocolate and therefore had to.

2. There were also multiple children’s authors of the time who seemed really invested in conveying the evils of television to their audiences. Maybe this was because TV really was worse then. Or maybe they knew it was their competition.

3. I am, after all, called “like other girls,” though I think about changing the name of my Substack every other hour, when I’m supposed to be working or regularly cleaning my microwave.

4. Okay, I’ll try to shut up with the footnotes after this, but fun fact: my boyfriend actually owns a book that was in Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment and that was given away on the street later! If you’re wondering how carefully the prop masters matched Carrie’s books to her personality, it’s philosophy.

5. Well, besides Candace Bushnell.

6. As for who really needs to learn about it, that’s probably Samantha, but I don’t trust her to finish 400 pages of near smutlessness.