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As Candace Bushnell continues promoting her latest novel One Fifth Avenue, more unsuspecting journalists are emerging from interviewing her vaguely traumatized, wondering what she has to be so temperamental about (other than the fact that her obsession with glitz and shopping is suddenly anachronistic) and especially now that the whole will they-won't they make the SATC sequel juggernaut is underway. But as an Independent reporter discovers, there's not much you can ask Bushnell without getting a testy reaction.

What's her opinion of TV comedy, such as SNL? "I used to watch Saturday Night Live when I was a teenager in 1976, but I don't think I'm going to be watching TV at 11:30 on a Saturday night."

Sarah Palin? "You know, I'm just going to pass on political questions."

The crisis of men and women's mismatched expectations that her work has identified? "I don't see a crisis. I see people getting on with things. The people I know who are married seem to be happily married, and engaged to life. They don't expect their husband to bring home the bacon. If you're very wedded to a narrow idea of what life should be, you're going to run out of time."

Candace Bushnell: Sex, success, the city and the zeitgeist [Independent]