Candace Bushnell: my family values

My childhood was idyllic. I grew up in Connecticut in the US in the 60s, in a town called Glastonbury where a lot of people had horses. My first horse was black and called Mini because he was really small. As a kid, having a horse is like having a car – I would ride out and meet my friends and we had all kinds of adventures.

I have two sisters. Alyssa is a year younger than me and Deirdre is four years younger. Alyssa was smaller than me, so sometimes she would take my clothes and resew them on the sewing machine so that they would only fit her. We were always up to some prank – we once painted our faces purple.

I was always putting on plays and trying to get kids in the neighbourhood to be in them. We had marionettes, Alyssa played instruments and we had a reel-to-reel tape recorder so we could do sound effects. When we were kids, our town library was huge in our lives – that was our outing. And cooking – I was a baker, the more difficult and complicated the cake, the better.

My parents met at a library. My mother had just graduated from college and was working in a library and my father, who was from Texas, came in. They fell in love and got married after eight months. I was born nine months later.

My father was a rocket scientist. He had a patent for the first fuel cell made for the Apollo space rocket. We had books about rockets and science and all that stuff, and my sister Deirdre did become an engineer – although now she actually has a wool mill and is famous in the world of wool.

My father had rules. We could date but the guy had to come to the house and meet my father. And if he didn’t like a guy, that was it. Alyssa once had a boyfriend my father just didn’t trust and he ran him off the property. That rule persisted into my adulthood – if I was dating a guy and I brought him home and my father didn’t like him, then I really would think twice. I always felt like my father had our best interests at heart.

My mother passed away 10 years ago and my father is still alive and lives about an hour away from me in Connecticut, so I see him once every couple of weeks. Alyssa lives in Montana so we don’t see her often, but Deirdre lives an hour away. She has three boys – the eldest is 13 – so I try and see them once a month. I don’t act like a substitute mother to them, though, more of a crazy aunt.

I never wanted kids, even when I was a kid. People would say, “Hold the baby,” and I was like, “No!” When I got married I was 43 and my husband, who was 10 years younger, did not want kids, which makes sense. If you want to have kids, you don’t marry someone who is 43. I’m divorced now and if I did get married again, I think I’d like to marry someone who is my age and has grown kids.

There was a book in the library about the Bushnell family and how four brothers came from England in 1635 and were farmers. We didn’t come on the Mayflower but supposedly one of the brothers married a woman who was born on the Mayflower – who knows if this stuff is true? They settled in Connecticut and there are things named Bushnell scattered around, such as Mount Bushnell. Later, my great-grandfather went out west by covered wagon and settled in Texas, where he had a huge family of 13 kids.

There is this family lore that Bushnells never believe in passing on any wealth to their children – they felt the kids had to make it on their own. My father would say, “When you’re 18, you’re on your own – that’s the Bushnell way!”

Killing Monica by Candace Bushnell is published by Little, Brown, £14.99