
Over the years, Carrie at her laptop—mostly typing some version of the phrase “And I couldn’t help but wonder…”—has become such an enduring image that it is, at this point, a widely shared meme. In And Just Like That, she does slightly less wondering—she’s a wannabe fiction writer now, as opposed to a sex columnist—but the typing is no less prominent. These days, however, there are even more intriguing elements to her famed laptop bashing, such as the fact she uses Pages over Google Docs (she has apparently learned nothing since the classic SATC Season 4 episode “My Motherboard, My Self” in which she loses all her work after her computer crashes) and also the fact that she clings onto such an old piece of technology. But anyway, I digress.
Writing as a practice has been romanticized for a long time. But when we think of classic images of “writing,” we generally don’t think of having our faces inches from a laptop screen while at a desk or cross-legged in bed. Instead, we think of Joan Didion surrounded by books beside her typewriter, or Patti Smith scrawling in a leather-bound notebook, or Virginia Woolf writing letters to Vita Sackville-West in her spidery slanted script. But Carrie Bradshaw? Though fictional, Carrie was possibly the first—and only—person to make laptop writing look cool and semi-glamorous, and for that I can only thank her (with my tired fingers).
I will probably never feel chic while hunched over a laptop on a deadline while it’s sunny outside. And there’s nothing glam about firing off emails at 5 p.m., regardless of who they’re to. Still, during those Friday nights in which I’m thwacking a keyboard instead of enjoying my social life like a regular person, or those times in which I’m practically glued to the screen all day as if my laptop is another limb, I can’t help but think (or wonder) of Carrie Bradshaw and feel marginally better about having not picked up an actual pen in months.
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