NOT FOR the first time, Candace Bushnell finds herself with an Australian journalist and feeling, as she might put it, snarkey.

The trigger for this sharpening of mood was my passing observation that her latest work - her fifth novel, called One Fifth Avenue - had become self-referential. Possibly she heard it as "self-reverential" but her response leaves no time for clarification.

"I know that probably drives you crazy, being an Australian," she begins. " 'She mentioned her own work. Oh! Do her in for thaaaat!' " Changing down a gear as if to emphasise every nuance of her New Yorker's drawl, she continues: "Honey ... get over it. You gotta grow up. You gotta let go ... of ll the jealousy."

Later she will reveal that a previous interviewer, nationality undisclosed, suggested Bushnell was arrogant in introducing a new character - a gold-digging 19-year-old called Lola Fabrikant - whose life choices are shaped solely by her perception of Sex And The City, the television series, based on Bushnell's own writings, that made her name.

But for now, there is no hint of what might lie behind her sensitivity to being "self-referential".

"I have spent time in London and Australia and Canada. Those are places where you are not supposed to blow your own horn and they seem to really resent that, and in their perception Americans will blow their own horns and they are boastful," Bushnell continues. "There is something twisted about that, as well. It's not always healthy to tear down the successful members of your society - it tears down everybody."

Bushnell arrives for lunch, in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, worrying about being seated at an inside table. She might need to slip outside for a cigarette. Perhaps if she gave up these packet-a-day "lights" and hit some full-strength she might cut down to five a day, she had speculated.
She barely pauses for breath, however, as she explains it would be stupid not to anchor Lola in the mythology of Sex And The City. So pervasive is its influence, of course it would have touched her.

Still, it is jarring since it suggests a world turning in on itself, given her new book reaches beyond the four-friends formula of her earlier work.
No. 1 Fifth Avenue, New York, is a landmark art deco apartment building. It looms over Washington Square Park, with its dog run and its buskers and chess hustlers. It has done so since its completion in 1929. It is a totemic presence in Bushnell's home near the West Village. Within its 29 storeys there are more than 160 apartments and, logically, several hundred residents.

Bushnell herself has not lived there, although she admires it and has inspected several of its apartments. For the novel she has fictionalised the building, which for her purposes serves as a Manhattanite version of something like the old television series Number 96 - except Bushnell's characters are much wealthier, more rarefied, ambitious, cynical, glamorous, affected and conniving than the suburban troupe that filled that '70s block.

In Bushnell's rendering, the death of an ancient society queen triggers an unseemly rush for her apartment that introduces a new, destabilising element to the building's tenants.

Bushnell has populated One Fifth Avenue with a middle-aged movie star starved of personal happiness, an accomplished writer who has sold out to write screenplays, a Wall Street trader as rich in his sense of entitlement as he is in hard currency, a sexually dormant couple, a building manager who uses her position to vent the frustrations of a stalled career and an aspirational writer who wants to be a modern Tolstoy and who is personally shattered when he achieves commercial success.

Other Big Apple figures include an ageing gossip columnist, a gay art aficionado and the aforementioned Lola Fabrikant, femme fatale.
By no means flawless - the novel loses its pacing after 380-odd pages to rush to its conclusion - it bristles with Bushnell's characteristic cynicism as she casts a critical eye over her surroundings. It is probably the best thing she has done. And as with her previous books - Sex And The City, Four Blondes, Lipstick Jungle and Trading Up - it probably will be bought for either the cinema or television.

The characters are not based on anyone in particular, Bushnell says, although people always ask. They are simply types. And certain types recur: writers with pretensions of literary achievement tend not to fare well in Bushnell's stories and the gold-digging Lola Fabrikant is the same type as earlier creation Janey Wilcox, who featured in Four Blondes and Trading Up.

"I always think one is inspired by different characters at different times. When I wrote Four Blondes, certainly the first three characters were women who had made certain mistakes. They were women who were trying to take the easy road and they weren't really ... it didn't really ... work out for them," she says.

"They found themselves in situations they wouldn't have expected and the character Janey Wilcox is a woman who is a borderline narcissist personality, which is something that I find fascinating and I think that character is a classic.

"You could say Madame Bovary is that kind of character; you could say that Anna Karenina is that kind of character ... The difference is that those books are written by men and they never really get into the heads of those characters. You are never in there all the time and you are in Janey Wilcox's head all the time. I know women like that and that's not meant to be a character you aspire to but I don't write books for those kinds of reasons. One writes books because one is trying to recreate reality."
A New Yorker by design and inclination, Bushnell arrived in the West Village in the late 1970s from semi-rural, leafy and cosy Connecticut, via several writing courses at Rice University in Texas.

She had been plotting a New York life from childhood. "Like many people I probably arrived here with about $50. I spent my first night in New York and loved it so much, I thought, I never want to leave."

After trying, without much success, to support herself as an actor, survival began with freelance assignments in what today might be called lifestyle journalism. Her first published piece was How To Act In A Disco, an exercise in drollery that was typical of much that followed.
She joined The New York Observer, where her observations of Manhattan society, its mating and dating rituals, came to define her and, simultaneously, its own subject.

"Brett Easton Ellis [author of American Psycho] and Jay McInerney [Bright Lights, Big City] and I were very good friends," she says. "We used to talk about how disturbing people can be." Some of those characters who feature in her Sex And The City columns she describes as "frightening".

Now, Bushnell and her characters are a rare phenomenon. Their biggest impact has come from their reinvention in television. Yet she evinces no ownership or proprietary sense of her work, no jealousy when it translates to screen.

"The book Sex And The City is social satire ... of a certain segment of New York society," she says.

"It was never written as a commercial book and it was not written for a mass audience. It was written for a very small, sophisticated, very savvy audience that read The New York Observer and it was about different types of New Yorkers. So the book was, I think, probably broader in its exploration of different types of New Yorkers and a TV series is a completely different medium with very different requirements.

"It requires that you have the same three or four or five characters every week. It requires that you have a place where they meet up and it requires specific interactions between those characters, whereas in a book one does not have those requirements and it's the requirement of the different mediums that determines the difference between the novels and the TV shows.
"I am thrilled the books go on and work in other mediums and that other people are inspired enough to put their hearts and souls into these projects.
"I am sure that [One Fifth Avenue] will be bought. You know all of my books have been bought for TV or movies and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't."

Evidence of the one that first worked is a short walk away. Across Seventh Avenue, in Perry Street, the owner of the New York brownstone that features as Carrie Bradshaw's home in the Sex And The City television series has strung a chain across the steps and a warning sign discouraging sightseers from loitering.

That, Bushnell says, finally resolving the tension created by the reference to being self-referential, is why Lola Fabrikant would make no sense as a character if she were unaware of Bradshaw. In any case, the joke is on Lola, who wants to live in the West Village, in a charming, roomy, well-lit apartment paid for by her parents.

"[Lola] has it all wrong. The reality of Carrie Bradshaw [is that] I lived in a tiny apartment and slept on a fold-out couch and paid my rent myself," Bushnell explains.

"The real Carrie Bradshaw slept on a fold-out couch and struggled. But in the 14 years since I started writing Sex And The City, now the perception is that Carrie Bradshaw lived with this glamorous closet."

Things have changed a lot for Bushnell in the years since. She now lives in an apartment in Greenwich Village, with her ballet-dancer husband Charles Askegaard, 10 years her junior, and the couple also enjoy a country house in Connecticut.

Bushnell is toying with an idea for her next project but is guarded about its subject.

"I am interested in writing good novels and someday, hopefully, great novels. I write things that I am interested in reading, that I don't find out there, and part of it is out of one's control," she says.

"I write the way I think. I found 100 pages of a novel I started writing when I was 28, and it's about the same subject matter, the same kind of characters. Probably darker than what I write now, if you can believe that but the same style, the same point of view. That's the voice and you can't change it that much.

"What I do is very specific. It's a Candace Bushnell book and I have a voice. I do what I do."

One Fifth Avenue, published by Little Brown, is out on October 1. Candace Bushnell will speak at a Herald/Dymocks literary luncheon on Friday, November 7. For bookings, phone 9449 4366.