Michael Lavine/BravoCarole Radziwill is a best-selling author, an Emmy-winning journalist and now a two-season reality star.
"I felt like I committed to doing the show and I felt like doing one season was a little bit of a cop out," Carole said about potentially being a one and done cast member of Real Housewives of New York City. The author is returning to Bravo's Real Housewives of New York City for a second go around when its sixth season premieres tonight, but she had some reservations about signing up again to live her life on camera.
Carole, who became pals with fellow Real Housewives of New York cast member Heather Thomson, said she was worried about having a bad season.
"If you look at the history of the show, people have good first seasons and sometimes come back and have bad second seasons. I spent 15 years in edit rooms, so I understand the miracle of editing, but I'm not going to say you get a good edit or a bad edit, you put the material on tape for them to edit any which way. I don't know, I just felt like [Heather and I] were a little concerned about that, and we felt like there were a few of the women by the end of the first season—unlike Heather and I who got really close and that was a real organic friendship—there were others that we left the season thinking, ‘Oh boy, she's just crazy. We don't really want to spend much time with her,'" Carole told E! News.
While on the show, Carole saw its benefit firsthand. Her memoir, "What Remains," returned to The New York Times bestsellers list six years after it originally came out, and the finishing touches of her new book, "The Widow's Guide to Sex and Dating: A Novel," are depicted in season six. But the levelheaded Carole stood out amongst her cast members solely by being levelheaded.
"I had a good time with it last year and just from a professional point of view, a business point of view, it proved to be very—how should I say it? It sold a lot of books. People watched the show and they became interested in me and they Google and they found out that I had written this book, ‘What Remains,' six years earlier and throughout the course of the season, I think that I sold close to 50,000 books," Carole told us. "To me, I look at it as a job, I've been working since I was 13, even through my marriage when my husband could have certainly paid my bills [Laughs]. But it's a job and I felt a little bit like maybe I'd be a quitter after just doing one season."
Last season, Carole was dating musician Russ Irwin, and this year's she's a "single girl, kind of about town."
"You'll see me go out on date. It's very hard, to be honest, to date on camera. It's very hard to see yourself dating…but I do go on dates, so you'll see that." But viewers will also get a look into the world of publishing as filming picked up the last steps of Carole's work on "The Widow's Guide." "A lot of my life is my work, so you'll see me meeting with editors and I record the audio book, do signings and press and stuff for the book," she said. "You'll see a lot of that. Then you'll see me complaining about my love life rather than participating in it."
Now that the cast has jelled—all the ladies return except LuAnn de Lesseps is recurring and Kristen Taekman has joined as a regular Housewife—the vibe in season six of Real Housewives of New York City is a bit different.
"There's definitely drama on this season and people love that, and also we had a lot of fun this season because we all knew each other much better. Last season we were just getting to know each other. This season right out of the gate you'll see Heather and I are very, very good friends and some of the other women we're not as close with and you see that right away," Carole said. "There's no figuring out who you like and who you don't like, so that makes it a much more dynamic show right from the very beginning, as you'll see."
Real Housewives of New York City premieres tonight at 9 p.m. on Bravo.
(E! and Bravo are both part of the NBCUniversal family.)