Finally, visualize the book you’d write about everything you’d learned. “As far as jobs go,” says writer Amy Sohn, laughing, “it was one of the best ones I’ve ever had.” Er, one of the best?
A journalist who’s written extensively on sex and relationships–most notably for the weekly newspaper New York Press and New York magazine–Sohn was chosen to author the recently published “Sex and the City: Kiss and Tell” (Melcher Media, 160 pages, $40), a fanatical look at the phenomenal HBO show. The Brooklyn, N.Y.-based author spent five months putting the project together. The result is a fizzy, addictive delight, even for the show’s most serious aficionados. “I took it for granted that people who bought the book would already have read every single article about the series, and I wanted new information,” says Sohn, whose first book, the novel “Run Catch Kiss,” was published in 1999.
“Kiss and Tell” contains a history of the show, a robust episode guide, interviews with the stars (plus their baby pictures), a New York City map detailing the show’s key moments, pages and pages on the fashion and, perhaps best of all, a glossary of ribald terms the show has put into the popular lexicon–only a handful of which we can publish in this space. NEWSWEEK’s B. J. Sigesmund spoke with Sohn about her severely tough assignment.
NEWSWEEK: The book reads like an encyclopedia about the show–every last detail is in there. You must have been a fan of the series before you got the job.
Amy Sohn: I’d say I was one notch down from a die-hard fan. I’d seen every episode but two. I got the job around September or October of 2001 and my first job was to just start interviewing people. And as the interviews were transcribed, we were also sort of shaping what the book would look like.
The book covers the first four seasons and provides an exhaustive episode guide. Great lines of dialogue–monologues even–pepper every page of the book.
It was very time-consuming, but the episode guide is actually my favorite part of the book. We also got all the shooting scripts. But most of the work I did was watching all of the episodes again.
What’s really amazing, though, is that you have a behind-the-scenes story for every episode–either an anecdote from Sarah Jessica Parker or the other actors, or something from one of the producers or writers. How did you do that?
I interviewed everyone associated with the show in a significant way. I tried to get the actors to tell me things they hadn’t told other people … There’s a great story about shooting outside Samantha’s apartment in the meat-packing district [of New York City]. They were near a gay leather club that was noisy. The only way they were able to get them to quiet down was that the owner of the club wanted to meet Kim Cattrall.
You focus a lot on the show’s writers and the writing process, too. The book even has a picture of the “writer’s board,” which contains story arcs for an entire season.
One thing a lot of people don’t realize is how many of the story lines of the show come from the lives of the show’s writers. They know how to translate their own experiences into drama and comedy. I wanted the writers’ role in shaping the show to be a prominent part of the book.
Fans will love the essay about the show’s opening credits, and the controversy over Parker’s white tutu. The book has stills from an alternate opening sequence, in which she’s wearing a blue Marc Jacobs dress.
Getting that original footage was a big coup on the side of the editors and graphic designers. They had to go back and get tape from 1996. And as far as the credits go, could you imagine an opening for “Sex and the City” where it’s like “Friends,” you know, with scenes from the show? You don’t want it to be like “Family Ties”–with Alex P. Keaton wheeling across the floor and doing that kind of mugging. In so many ways the show’s more like a movie, so it makes sense.
Talk about the section called “The Dating Game,” which in just two pages somehow charts every single guy these women have gone out with–and divides them into carnal categories of “did” and “didn’t.”
Early on, we knew one of the questions fans might have was, “How many guys exactly have there been?” And we wanted to do it tastefully. One of the big surprises was that Carrie’s not had sex with a lot of guys. She’s the smallest number of “did.” And Charlotte, whom you might think of as a prude, actually “did” one more guy than Miranda.
There are pages and pages devoted to the fashion.
We knew a lot of the people buying the book would be obsessed with the fashion. You get to see spreads on each of the women. Carrie’s the most eclectic, they use red on Samantha a lot, you see how Charlotte’s look evolved from SoHo gallery girl to a classic Upper East Side wife and Miranda’s the most corporate, but when she’s not working they let her be casual.
You’ve also included a map with destinations that are important to the show.
We wanted to show people where they could find some of the real locations that were used. We show the corner where Trey met Charlotte. There’s the restaurant, Il Cantinori, where Carrie celebrates her 35th birthday after being stood up by everyone. The manager of the restaurant told me people are coming in a lot and asking to sit at “the Carrie table.”
And then there’s the glossary, which has more laughs per page than anything else in the book.
When talking about the show, people will reference specific language, this amazing array of “Sex and the City” terms they’ve put into the popular lexicon: “good on paper,” “straight-gay man,” “yogasm” and my favorite, the “island of lost men”–that’s where guys go when they say they’ll call and they haven’t. A lot of the terms tend to be Samantha-isms, since she’s the most dirty and she uses a lot of sexual wordplay.
The next season will reportedly be the last for “Sex and the City.” How do you want to see it end?
I hope that when the show ends, Carrie’s still single. That’s very important to me, and I think it’s important to a lot of women. That’s what we’re going to see happening in our society. There are going to be more and more women who never get married. The stigma is going to start to erode, the same way that it’s eroded for men. I think one of the characters should be married. But Carrie should definitely be single.
