Twenty years on, I couldn't help but wonder...

Modelisers and Manolos. Toxic bachelors and the up-the-butt girl. Cosmos and a popular toy called "the rabbit". You can carbon-date a woman by her familiarity with Sex and the City. If you nodded in recognition at all the items above, you're most likely a woman aged somewhere between her late 30s and late 50s.

Yes, it's been that long. Babies born the year Carrie Bradshaw first typed "I couldn't help but wonder …" celebrate their 21st birthdays this year. And Candace Bushnell, the glamorous girl-about-town columnist on whom Carrie was based? She turned 60 last December.

Candace Bushnell, 60 (centre), began writing about the adventures of, from left, Charlotte, Carrie, Miranda and Samantha 21 years ago.

Perhaps to celebrate, Bushnell has published a new memoir, titled Is There Still Sex in the City? In it, she casts a sharp, albeit now long-sighted, eye over the promises and pitfalls of dating in middle age. It begins with one of Bushnell's dogs dropping dead on the street and her husband – a ballet dancer who inspired SATC's Petrovsky character – asking for a divorce. Then Bushnell's bank informs her that, as a newly single, self-employed woman over 50, she will not be approved for a new mortgage.

Reading this first chapter, a sense of sadness settled around me like a damp mist. I'm no rusted-on SATC fan. Initially a subversive celebration of women's independence, the show became a victim of its own mainstream success, with Carrie morphing slowly into a mishmash of materialism and romantic clichés, punctuated by Sarah Jessica Parker's squeals.

But then, my connection to the series was never Carrie Bradshaw. It was Bushnell herself. I first met her in 1999. I was a newly arrived foreign correspondent in NYC and, keen to land an interview with the writer behind this cult hit, I'd tracked her down via an advertisement from The Learning Annex. For $39, women could hear Bushnell share her tips on "How to Meet, Mate and Marry in New York".

I saw her legs first: encased in leather, and as fine and long as a thoroughbred's. Then the sullen red glow of a cigarette. I introduced myself and she confided she wasn't sure why she was doing this. That day, a tabloid had published a feature on eligible NY women who couldn't get dates. Bushnell was one of them. The hall was full of women whose eyes brimmed with hope while their poised pens screamed desperation. Fielding their questions, Bushnell swung between incomprehension and impatience. When a larger lady in a wrinkled suit asked for directions to Balthazar, a hot new restaurant, a look of outright irritation flitted across her face.

Afterwards, we shared an eye-roll. As she scribbled her home number in my notebook, I felt smug, as if I'd been approved entry to a club so exclusive I hadn't known of its existence until that very moment. I waited until she disappeared in a limousine before pulling out my dog-eared subway map.

Two months later, we met again. Bushnell had suggested an interview over champagne at one of her favourite Upper East Side bars. By then, it was mid-summer and I was learning another new thing about New York: its heatwaves are brutal. After I'd slogged uptown through soupy humidity, my hair had frizzed upwards in inverse proportion to my make-up, which had settled on my neck like a ring around a bathtub.

Again, I saw her legs first, stretching from a tiny Calvin Klein miniskirt to fierce Prada heels. She took one look at me and unfurled from her bar stool, shuffling me briskly to a booth at the very back. I may have been an NYC neophyte, but I knew what this meant. We did the interview and she never returned another call.

Is There Still Sex in the City? By Candace Bushnell.Credit: AAP

Still, as I read her new book two decades later, I couldn't help but wonder why I wasn't enjoying some schadenfreude over Bushnell's recent difficulties. You might be a size zero with a wardrobe full of designer labels, a hit TV series and a lucrative publishing deal, but you didn't find love and I did! (Sure, it took two practice marriages and waiting until my mid-40s for the real deal, but still.) And you have two dogs, whereas I have two kids!

But I can't. Because, as she reflects on a divorced and newly impoverished friend, and how loaded the deck seems to be against all women, particularly as they age, Bushnell is so excruciatingly honest I want to hug her: I wonder if she's disappointed with her life, the way I sometimes am. And if she worries about the price she'll pay for being a woman in the first place and not doing everything right, the way I often do. And then I calm myself with the mantra that has soothed women for ages when we ask those questions: it's all about choices. Like we actually have control over our lives.

When they make the series about this book, I doubt they'll include those lines. They're too real. But, if you're lucky, that's something you gain as you age. You get wrinkles. You get grey hair. You get hot flushes and saggy boobs. But you also get real – and that gives you strength.

So it seems I have something in common with Candace Bushnell after all. And this time, I think it will stick, better than make-up on a New York summer's day.

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