But so do you, and so does Charles Dickens
This piece was origionally published on Substack
I think the writers of Sex and the City made Carrie annoying because they hate themselves. I think this because I’m a writer and sometimes I hate myself, but in the jovial kind of way that you shouldn’t worry about. My 22 year-old daughter and I are watching the original series—her for the first time and me for something like the fifth. Last night after Karli and I watched Carrie chastise Alexander Petrovski multiple times for telling her that he had a friend die of breast cancer, I couldn’t help but wonder why I never realized in the early aughts how annoying of a character she is. All she had to say was that she was sorry his friend died, but she made it about her. She makes everything about her.
She had wild tantrums when Big didn’t give her what she wanted, and was straight up mean to Aidan. She even had the audacity to tell Aidan that Big was a non-negotiable in her life when Aidan took her back in season 4 after she cheated on him with Big in season 3. The only relationships she had where I was actually on her side were the ones where she was in relationship with other authors: the short story writer with premature ejaculation because he refused to work with her on his shortcoming and Jack Burger the tortured scrunchie artist because he was passive aggressive about her success.
She’s not just a bad girlfriend but a bad friend. There’s an episode where Miranda starts making jokes about single people while she and Carrie are in a group of coupled-up friends, and you can see Carrie getting visibly annoyed that Miranda is the one getting laughs. After they leave the party she makes fun of Miranda for making jokes. It has a ‘that’s my job’ energy to it. On the morning of Charlotte’s wedding to Trey, Carrie decides it would be a good idea to tell Aidan that she’s been having an affair with Big. She couldn’t just let it be Charlotte’s day and hold it in for six hours the same way she’d held it in the weeks leading up to her confession.
I watch Sarah Fay’s workshop on how to make a post go viral. She’s highlighting everything Kristin Powers did right to get people interested in her viral essay about leaving the U.S., and I think about that feeling I got back in school when the teacher read someone else’s essay in front of the class. The teacher gave this big preamble that started with “There was one essay that stood out from the rest…” and mentally I got up out of my chair to collect my Pulitzer, but this strange thing happened where she started reading someone else’s words. There must have been some kind of gross oversight. Did she even read my essay? Someone else is a good writer, too? It happened multiple times with multiple teachers. What the hell? During the time it took to regain my composure, I missed half of the great essays that other ordinary less special students worked very hard on. Is this how most writing lives begin, or just mine?
My sister, Trish tells me about this award they have at Sephora called the VIA. I keep seeing the word v-i-l-l-a in my head as she talks about it, and I imagine make-up artists giving each-other little tiny Spanish dollhouses until she explains the acronym to me: Values In Action. V-I-A. It’s a way of giving accolades to team members for their exemplary performance. She describes the situation where she would be sitting there as the manager listed the characteristics of the VIA recipient:
“This is a person who always comes to work with a smile on her face, has a good attitude, puts the client first, et cetera et cetera.”
Trish would be certain that the manager was about to say her own name and then become incredulous when she announced that the award was going to someone else. I had a similar experience when I worked at the country club in Eugene where one of the Jens (there were a lot of Jennifers in charge) would have this big preamble about the unnamed employee of the month (it was never me) before she announced who the person actually was. I would sit there expecting it to be me. I’m hard-working, a team player, reliable, beloved, aren’t I? And then she said Claude or something and I would be left with the thought that I must just have an inflated ego. All this work was for nothing. I may as well storm out of this meeting right now since Claude is getting all the attention that I deserve.
I thought about it and realized it’s not me or Trish that are the problem, but these teachers, managers, institutions and countries who are setting up the entire staff or class or population to imagine that they might be the one that is in the exalted position of best writer or best wine glass polisher, or best foundation-matcher. It’s like life is a series of moments where we are all pitted against each other.
Pick me. Pick me.
I watch the scene where Carrie compiles her columns for her book, and I think Jesus Christ I’m modeling my entire life after Sex and the City. I have this hodge-podge of essays about being sober, and drunk and normal and weird that I’m trying to compile into something that resembles a quit-lit book. When I learn that Dickens also serialized his novels, I’m like, fuck off. I’m not just the fictional Carrie Bradshaw but the very real Charles Dickens—the difference being that I don’t write for any particular recognized publication, and I don’t write about my friends and my sex lives, and I’m not a 19th century British author writing about curmudgeons, but still.
My daughter, unlike me picks up on how annoying Carrie is right away. How is she already so much smarter than me? I worry that her favorite character is Samantha. I can’t stop myself from being a mom and telling her that casual sex isn’t that great and Sex and the City is a lie. When I got sober I realized that kind of abrupt intimacy gives me the ick. I’m disappointed in the example my fictional New York big sisters set for me when they had sex on first and second dates all over HBO. I got into the practice of throwing on a pair of heels on after work so I could look sophisticated with shapely legs at the bar. I broke my fibula after being too drunk while jumping out of a pick-up truck in Manolos.
That’s crazy. They weren’t Manolos. Have you seen the shoe-shame episode and what a pair of those costs? They were Kenzie’s, they were brown, and that was the last time I wore heels.
Every time Big comes on screen, Karli’s face lights up.
“I want Big to come back, but I don’t want him to be with Carrie.”
“Because you want him to be with you?”
“Yes.”
Rats. She’s got the pick-me disease. She says there’s just something about him. What she has watched in condensed form over a few weeks is what I watched year after year through the course of my 20s. For those who haven’t seen the show, Big is the man who won’t commit but keeps trotting back into Carrie’s life getting her hopes up and then disappointing her. In the end he comes around and becomes the boyfriend she always wanted him to be. It’s a poisonous fairytale.
I realize as I watch that I am now older than everyone except Samantha. When I originally watched, I was a baby like Karli, and the four friends were the wise and sophisticated socialites who made borough jokes and threw martinis in the faces of dirty bastards.
I spend my thirties and forties trying to undo everything that Sex and the City and every story about romantic love did to me. This desire to be the one who is finally chosen. This thing we have where we need to prove ourselves to be the one to be the person who wins, who stands out who is special. This is the thing that kept me in the triangle with the serial cheater because I forgot about what it is that I wanted once I was in competition with someone who wanted the same thing. Peace is in letting go of the competition. Oh it’s so un-American to say I don’t care if I win. I don’t need to be the one who sells the most cocktails, has the most eyelashes, stands on the highest heels. I’m not trying to see over anyone’s head.
The pick-me energy at the relational level can slowly kill your spirit. Anyone who’s been in a triangle with a love-con feels this. This slow withering of the self. I’m reading this Czech novel by Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being, about a philanderer, his wife and his mistress. The wife decides that she’s going to sleep with someone else after years of wishing her husband would finally become faithful to her.
“Suddenly she longed to dismiss her body as one dismisses a servant: to stay on with Tomas only as a soul and send her body into the world to behave as other female bodies behave with male bodies. If her body had failed to become the only body for Tomas, and thereby lost her the biggest battle of her life, it could just as well go off on its own!”
That pick-me energy is so deep in some of us. Imagine making it the biggest battle of one’s life to captivate your own husband. To make it so big that you let him have your soul and send your body out into the world without it. That is what it feels like though, not to be chosen. It could get you in a death-grip. The misfortune of looking around and seeing your fellow humans as competition instead of as their own unique sources of beauty. The reader in me is like, how the hell did this Czech-French writer born in 1929 identify how bankrupt it felt for me to be in a shitty relationship in 2010? The writer in me is like give up. You have nothing new to say. You are just a reincarnation of a fictional character that keeps being written about and will keep being written about from now into eternity.
Bless the enlightened few who are capable of living peaceful domestic life in a throuple. Whenever I hear Martha Beck, and her wife Rowan talk about Karen on their podcast, I get a little twinge of jealousy at how secure everyone must feel in themselves to be in a three-way relationship.
When we finish Sex and the City, and Big finally chooses Carrie, Trish instructs Karli to never see the movies or the reboot.
“Stay pure,” She says. “You’ll get nothing from them.”
I have this instinct to tell her, ‘Delete.! Delete! You’ll get nothing from this either. You have enough shoes. You only need three pairs, and he never chooses you. Choose yourself. Choose cats and art and books!’
But it still shows up. Every cat has her favorite human. The right book always finds its way into your hands. You get chosen for the position because you stand out.
Kundera whispers in my ear while I’m curled up with his book on a stormy day,
“[C]haracters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about.
But isn’t it true that an author can write only about himself?”
I was really upset at the beginning of the year when someone compared me to Carrie Bradshaw, but now that I’ve thought about it for months and rewatched the entire show I want to throw my hands up in the air Carrie-style and confess.
Yeah. I am, but so are you, and so is Charles Dickens.