The Carrie Diaries

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The name Carrie Bradshaw is one that’s instantly recognised and immediately calls images of glamour, sex, and relationship drama to mind. Even if you’ve never watched an episode of HBO’s Sex & the City, you know all about the sassy columnist who’s looking for love: she’s probably one of the most recognised female characters around.

The Carrie Diaries tells us all about Carrie before she became the Carrie Bradshaw. Life is going fine as she enters her senior year. She has a group of great friends, aspirations to become a writer, and dreams of moving to New York. That is until Sebastian Kydd comes to town. Caught up in a romance with the new boy, Carrie’s world is thrown into chaos as she tries to navigate the minefields of dating, deals with the dramas of her friends, and suffers a betrayal that changes her ideas of the world.

This book definitely falls into the category of ‘guilty literary pleasure’. You know, it’s the type of book you indulge in knowing it’s trashy, predictable, clichéd, and no example of literary genius by any stretch of the imagination; and you revel in all of it. The Carrie Diaries is really as delightfully terrible as it sounds. The central story is predictable, but with a few twists and turns that keep in interesting, the world is not amazingly constructed, and the characters are all pretty mediocre. 

As a character study, it’s interesting hearing Carrie’s gossipy-yet-poetic tone describing the dramas of high school as well as witnessing the changes that morph her into the beloved New York columnist. Though it may be talking about clichéd and predictable teen things like cliques, idealistic romance, and gushy best-friendships the book has a nice adult tone that isn’t camp, but realistic and this gives it a fresh edge to counter the content and it kept me turning pages.

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But it goes with saying that this book if for a certain audience. It’s girlish, gossipy, and a tad trashy –I have no qualms admitting it- and the kick that one does get out of it comes from having prior exposure to the character of Carrie Bradshaw, either from having read Sex & the City or seen the show. Images of Sarah Jessica Parker minus the wardrobe were constantly swirling around my head as a read each new drama, something that definitely could not have happened if I’d picked this up as a Bradshaw virgin. But if you’ve had Carrie exposure, then this is a fun read.

The Carrie Diaries was written by Candace Bushnell in 2010 and published by HarperCollinsPublishers.