The Amount Candace Bushnell Made For Writing Her Sex And The City Column May Surprise You
As "Sex and the City" fans know, the character of Carrie Bradshaw was loosely based on writer Candace Bushnell. The New York writer is even called "the real life Carrie Bradshaw" by Vogue. So one has to wonder if Bushnell lived like Carrie with a designer wardrobe and enough shoes to open her own boutique on the Upper East Side.
To be fair, we saw the fictional writer struggle financially at certain points of the show, like when she borrowed $40,000 from Charlotte York to use as a downpayment for her apartment (via Refinery29). But according to CheatSheet, Carrie's estimated income for writing her column in the fictional newspaper The New York Star would only have been around $38,000 per year. Consider that a pair of Manolo Blahniks costs upwards of $555 and you do the math on how feasible it would be for Carrie to live like, well, Carrie.
But it turns out that Bushnell herself actually did better than you'd think as a writer in the 1990s. Indeed, the real life Carrie wrote the column "Sex and the City" for the Observer newspaper according to The New Yorker. And while that didn't pay that well, Bushnell had other work that netted her more than you might think.
Candace Bushnell made good money as it turns out
In a new interview, Bushnell told The New Yorker exactly what she made as a writer in New York City in the 1990s. "I worked for Vogue, writing the 'People Are Talking About' column, and got paid five thousand dollars a month," the book author said, going on to explain, "The Observer paid less, but I could afford that, because of Vogue."
She also confided to fans, "I mean, this was a time that writers were getting a Vanity Fair contract for six pieces and two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year." Bushnell also opined, "People valued writing; it wasn't considered something everyone can do. Now, because of the computer, everyone has to do it, so we think everyone can do it."
Ultimately, as People notes, given the pay scale described in the interview, maybe Carrie's obsession with fashion and footwear in the HBO series wasn't so far fetched after all!