Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell admitted in an interview with the Sunday Times that she now regrets putting her career ahead of having children and feels “truly alone.”

The author behind the famed HBO series featuring Sarah Jessica Parker — whose character “chooses her independence over motherhood” — said her 2012 divorce stirred up emotions that made her realize that family was something she should have pursued.

“When I was in my thirties and forties, I didn’t think about it,” she said, according to the Daily Mail. “Then when I got divorced and I was in my fifties, I started to see the impact of not having children and of truly being alone. I do see that people with children have an anchor in a way that people who have no kids don’t.”

She recently wrote another book based on her own experiences titled Is there still Sex in the City?

As Fox News reported:

The book, which drops in August, deals with what Bushnell calls “middle-aged sadness,” along with the new obstacles women face once they turn 50. And according to Deadline, the heavily anticipated book is already being adapted into a television series. The novel follows a group of middle-aged New York City women who travel to the Hamptons in order to find a fresh start. In a recent interview with the New York Post, Bushnell reveals the novel was inspired by her real-life relocation to the Hamptons, alongside several of her friends. “We’re all single women without children. And you think about, what are you going to do when you get old?” she said. “If you don’t have kids, you realize, ‘Who is going to take care of me?’ Your girlfriends.”

“In many ways this book is a triumph for me: In the three years it took to write I endured a lot of emotional pain,” Bushnell wrote in an Instagram post last month.

She continued:

There was the fallout of my divorce, I moved, my father died and my best friend took her life. There were times when I wondered what I was doing and why, when I questioned what was the point of it all. When I questioned what was the point of me? Sometimes the only way I could continue was by pretending I was an anthropologist from another planet determined to record the goings on of these crazy creatures called humans. And miraculously what I didn’t lose was my greatest blessing: My sense of humor. This ability to laugh in the face of pain and sorrow and uncertainty is what I bring to you in Is There Still Sex in the City. Every novel is a culmination of what one has learned in life, but Is There Still Sex is especially so. I hope you’ll love this book as much as I do!

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