Carrie Bradshaw before Sex and the City – Candance Bushnell’s new book

Before Sex and the City, there was Carrie Bradshaw, small town girl trying to navigate her senior year of high school. Such is the setting for Candace Bushnell’s newest book, The Carrie Diaries, which is essentially a prequel chronicling the life America’s favorite martini sipping fashionista-cum-social observer before she became the star of Sex and the City series.

For those of you picturing adolescent Carrie and her crew of girlfriends transplanted into suburban Connecticut, hormonal and boy-crazy (as we all are at 17), banish those thoughts.

While The Diaries does include a good dose of teen dating, sex, and heartbreak- enter quintessential bad boy Sebastian Kydd- it also chronicles how our beloved Carrie grows into her skin.

Carrie, awkward teen, seems just like any other girl trying to get through high school in the ’80s, but Sex and the City fans will enjoy reading about how Carrie Bradshaw, full-fledged New Yorker, came to be.

She finds her writing voice figuring out family, friendships, and relationships, and we see shadows forming of the woman she is to become. Readers of the prequel will get to know Carrie better, understand what makes her tick, and ultimately, what brings her to the Big Apple.

On to the bigger question: will we see young Carrie on the silver screen? MTV has sought the answer to this question about The Carrie Diaries, but fans will just have to wait and see.

“Every single one of my books has been optioned and one of my books has been optioned twice,” explained Bushnell on the likelihood of cinematic adaptation. But for now, it is out of her hands.

Meanwhile, Bushnell is penning the sequel to the prequel, The Carrie Diaries 2.