Carrie Bradshaw - Character History and Personality

Character History and Personality

Carrie writes a weekly column called "Sex and the City" for fictional newspaper, The New York Star. The column focuses on Carrie's sexual escapades and those of her close friends, as well as musings about the relationships between men and women, dating, and New York. It provides Carrie with a certain amount of recognition in the city. People who read her column occasionally describe her as their icon. In the third season, her column is optioned for a film produced by Matthew McConaughey. In the fifth season, some of her columns are compiled into a book. At the end of season four, Carrie begins to write freelance articles for Vogue. Although she initially has trouble dealing with Enid (Candice Bergen), her abrasive, demanding editor at Vogue, she does find her feet and ends up befriending her.

Carrie is notoriously led by her emotions. She seeks acceptance (a door key, bathroom cabinet space) from Mr. Big and others (she obsesses over the review her book received from book critic Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times). "Just tell me I'm the one" she urges Mr. Big at the end of Season 1, worried about his refusal to introduce her to his mother. She often behaves in a selfish manner (as seen during her affair) but unless her self-involvement is pointed out by friends, she is apt to blame this on her tendency to get 'Carried Away', a phrase coined by Mr. Big in Season 2. The result is a flawed but relatable character due to the self-deprecating humor with which she tackles stereotypical issues within male–female relationships (commitment being the running theme).

Carrie is an on-off smoker and when she smokes, she is mostly seen with Marlboro Lights. She tries to quit in seasons 3 and 4 using the Nicotine patch while dating Aidan. She enjoys cocktails (particularly cosmopolitans—her character's fondness for them helped to popularize the drink). While Carrie is a realist about the difficulties of relationships, having experienced many bad ones throughout the course of the series, she is a romantic on an endless search for true love, and refuses to settle for, as she puts it, "anything less than butterflies." Despite this, she repeatedly expresses doubts that she is the type to get married and raise a family.

Carrie is a resident of the borough of Manhattan in New York City. She lives in a brownstone on the Upper East Side at the fictional house number of 245, on East 73rd Street, between Park and Madison. She lives in this apartment throughout the series, and buys it from Aidan in the fourth season. In the initial episodes of the first season, Carrie's apartment is seen to be above a coffee shop somewhere near the vicinity of Madison Avenue. By approximately the fourth episode, the usual facade of a series of brownstones adjacent to hers is adopted, and remains that way throughout the series. The first episode also features a different apartment from the one used for the next 93 episodes and the movies. In the real life, the building with the famous stairs is 66 Perry Street, N.Y.C (West Village, Manhattan).

Little is mentioned about Carrie's life before the series. Carrie arrived in Manhattan on Tuesday, June 11, 1986 when she was approximately 21, given her age that is mentioned at other points in the series. She says in the movie that she's lived in her apartment for 20 years (although she states at age 35, she had been living there for a decade), meaning she lived in the city five years before moving to that location. In season four, Carrie tells a photographer that she was so poor when she first moved to New York that she would purchase Vogue instead of dinner. It is mentioned that her father left her and her mother when she was five; no siblings are mentioned. It is also revealed that Carrie had an abortion in 1988 after a one-night stand with a waiter when she was 22.

She tells Charlotte that she lost her virginity in Seth Bateman's smelly rec room on the ping pong table in eleventh grade. In Season 6 ("Boy Interrupted"), Carrie meets up with another boyfriend from high school named Jeremy (David Duchovny). Carrie states that she never had sex with him because they were young and wanted to wait.

Candace Bushnell, author of Sex and the City, recently released her new book, Summer and the City: A Carrie Diaries Novel as part of her young adult series that follows the Sex and the City characters as teenagers. This novel reveals that Carrie attended the prestigious Ivy League University, Brown, in the 1980s.