There is a great Anne Boyer poem called “At Least Two Types of People.” The first type of person makes sense in society: “They are not alien from the creation and maintenance of the world, and the world does not treat them as alien.” They intuitively know the right way to sit, stand, eat, dress. The second type does not have it so easy. This type repels and resists, and is someone “for whom the salaries and weddings and garages do not come.” Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City and the considerably more deranged reboot And Just Like That… raises the possibility of a third type of person.
At 58-ish years old, despite having all the material trappings of the first type and (almost) none of the bad luck of the second, Carrie fits the definition of alien exactly. (That run-walk always felt off...) She is in a long-distance situationship with the most annoying man this side of Appalachia, is writing historical romance fiction inspired by the rats in her backyard, and still hasn’t bought furniture for her Gramercy Park home that features a grumpy-hot British tenant she won’t admit she’s attracted to. She got the job, the boyfriend, and the apartment in the city where she argues you’re always looking for one of the three (see: episode 5, season 5 of Sex and the City), yet she’s having bad phone sex and wearing hats that give her the appearance of a cottagecore Speedy Gonzales.
Amid this sorry state of affairs, we have one last bastion of relatability—a potential window into the psyche of the third type of person: the books she reads. The hardbacks Carrie carts around in lieu of a Gucci top-handle or Fendi baguette might just reveal the emotions she obfuscates with quippy one-liners.
Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) slowly unpacks her new apartment in And Just Like That... season 3—but makes sure to prioritze unpacking her books.
While Carrie has always been a reader, trophies of literary fiction appear in AJLT as more welcome product placement than Carrie’s egregious ingestion of TUMS. The books are, in part, star and executive producer Sarah Jessica Parker’s influence, as she provided the props team with literary suggestions for different characters. The actress has said to plow through two volumes a day in the run-up to her duties as a Booker Prize judge, a great excuse for why she doesn’t watch her own show. (SJP also has an imprint with independent press Zando, publishing work by contemporary women novelists, including Lucy Caldwell’s prizewinning These Days.)
I found myself pausing the show whenever a book appeared, hoping for a crumb of intertextual honesty. While we could interpret the vintage reissue of Helen Garner’s This House of Grief as a mere styling complement to a purple satin tunic, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was reading a book about, say, a father’s trial for the murder of his children a sign of plot points to come? A diegetic cry for help? Below are my findings (though I’m bereft to report I’m no closer to locating where in the world Che Diaz is).
In season 3 of AJLT, Carrie fashions herself as a romance novelist.
'This House of Grief' by Helen Garner
Beloved Australian writer Helen Garner has only recently caught on in the U.S.; Carrie must have read the New Yorker profile that described Garner as “candid about her emotions, analyzing them with a degree of remove which allows her to illustrate, with an unsparing empathy, how irrational we all can be, and how little we understand of our own behavior, let alone that of those around us.” This House of Grief is an interesting choice. The nonfiction book recounts the 2005 trial of Robert Farquharson, a man charged with drowning his three sons, ages 10, 7, and 2, by driving his car into a dam.
Blame it on being a boy dad, but the transcripts of Farquharson on the witness stand reminded me of Aidan (John Corbett) at his whiniest: “I should have been there, Carrie…I should have been there.” Carrie has remained democratic about the situation regarding Aidan’s problem child, Wyatt. But after he “accidentally” bashed her in the head during laser tag, I wouldn’t blame her for indulging in the fantasy of a little roadside accident portrayed as a crime of passion.
'Evenings and Weekends' by Oisín McKenna
Spied between the bulges at Anthony’s (Mario Cantone) newly opened Hot Fellas bakery is Carrie’s U.K. edition of Evenings and Weekends by Oisín McKenna, a novel about gay 20-somethings sucking and fucking their way through a hot summer in London. Carrie has always been alarmingly prudish and out of touch for a sex columnist. She couldn’t stomach dating a bisexual man in the ‘90s and refused to say “vagina” in an ad on her podcast, resulting in its entire collapse, putting her comedian co-hosts Che Diaz (Sara Ramírez) on the street and Jackie Nee (Bobby Lee) off the wagon. So this fever dream of a book about love and lust is also research. What is it like to see a naked body that isn’t Aidan’s or Big’s? Would she ever again feel the sense that she was “alone in an enormous city, and there were dozens of shapes her life might take”?
Carrie is probably also using McKenna’s prose to better picture Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall) in London, where “fashion queers strut past the station dressed like early 2000s pop stars and characters from The Matrix.” The PR maven doesn’t deign to give Carrie a scene report herself—she appears only as an iMessage bubble about once a season, having adopted the mantra of Cattrall: “I don’t want to be in a situation for even an hour where I’m not enjoying myself.”
Carrie joins Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) and Charlotte (Kristin Davis) for coffee with a book in tow.
'The Life of the Mind' by Christine Smallwood
Christine Smallwood is the high priestess of writing about the phones. Her characters text, scroll, and photograph; the drama erupts from the screen. AJLT similarly spins around the axis of technology. Multi-episode plotlines are dedicated to boomer-style mishaps like Aidan’s thumbs-up reaction to a message or ill-timed phone sex. Lisa Todd Wexley (Nicole Ari Parker) had her phone on silent mode while she was in the editing bay with her work crush, meaning she didn’t get the call that her father had a stroke, meaning she missed saying goodbye to him when he died for the second time. Carrie once professed, “After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breathe and reboot.” She’s never giving up that MacBook, so she might as well lean in.
'We Burn Daylight' by Bret Anthony Johnston
Bret Anthony Johnston’s Shakespearian novel about star-crossed lovers in a doomsday Christian cult, based on the real Waco, Texas siege, is a warning against isolation. Carrie learned too much about the Shaw family when she visited Virginia; she felt on the outside of their bond, and she seems to have accepted it. The strangest part of Aidan admitting that he slept with his ex-wife (because they were so distraught about their youngest son’s behavioral issues…?) was Carrie’s lack of a reaction. She did not expect total fidelity because they’d never defined their LDR, she explains—although this does not mean she wants to be with anyone else. Johnston is not out to shame his religious zealot characters, cut-and-dry, and instead asks the universally applicable question, “What would you sacrifice for the one you love?” Spoiler: It’s a bloody, brutal end, but the teenage lovers both survive. There might be mess. Carrie might be flirting with downstairs tenant Duncan Reeves (Jonathan Cake) too close to the sun. Still, she has so far been adamant that she has a boyfriend, Miranda. She hopes she’s the Juliet who lives.
Carrie with another one of her new fixations: her kitten named Shoe.
'The Berry Pickers' by Amanda Peters
Yet another tragic splintering of a family in a rural setting? Carrie is simply obsessed with reading about dead or missing children this season. In the second Sex and the City movie, which I’m loath to remind anyone of, Carrie declared that having kids is “just not for us…It’s just not who we are,” meaning her and Big. (Carrie’s childlessness could have been built out as an intriguing plot point in AJLT, but that would require the writers to learn subtlety and sensitivity.) Amanda Peters’s mystery revolving around a 4-year-old Mi'kmaq girl kidnapped from a blueberry field in Maine is rich with strange coincidences—and the same can be said for Carrie’s life. She’s perpetually waiting for a sign that the man is right, that the shoe fits. If The Berry Pickers can offer any insights, it’s that the world never makes logical sense.
'Catch the Rabbit' by Lana Bastašić
A female friendship novel that doubles as a Bosnian road trip adventure, Lana Bastašić captures the tension inherent in a relationship between two women who use one another as a mirror. “I can’t recall half my childhood, yet I remember the details of her with irritating clarity,” Bastašić writes. “Blue bubble gum, watermelon flavor. A scratch on her left knee. Cracks in the red lips. One time she had told me that writers write because they don’t have memories of their own, so they make some up.” Carrie has had tiffs, rifts, and all-out rows with every one of her friends, though she is most comfortable being a bitch to Miranda (Cynthia Nixon). God forbid a houseguest help herself to a yogurt. (Though tiptoeing to the bathroom fully nude in someone else’s home is bizarre, I’ll admit.) Bastašić shows how important history is to a friendship, but if Miranda makes one more wrong move, she risks Carrie’s new pal Seema (Sarita Choudhury) replacing her entirely.