Last year, around St. Patrick’s Day, as auspicious a time as any for a writer with Irish blood to start telling a story, Michael Patrick King left his house in the Hollywood Hills and drove to a motel in Palm Desert, Calif., where he spent 16 days thinking about four women whose approach to love, friendship and money defined the manners and folkways of affluent single life at the turn of the new century.

For five of its seven seasons King served as head writer of the HBO series Sex and the City, until it ended in a big, blooming peony of joy and bittersweet sentiment four years ago. Out in the desert he returned to the characters who had shifted his fortunes, shaping the script for the coming movie based on the series, scheduled to arrive on May 30, which marks his debut as a screenwriter and film director at 53.

Beyond the matter of his age, King has always seemed an unlikely voice of the upper-middle-class post-feminist experience. An openly gay man, a former altar boy and a child of Scranton, Pa., he arrived at the pinnacle of television comedy writing (he is also responsible for the brilliant but short-lived HBO series The Comeback) without the imprimatur of an Ivy League education and the connections attending it. While the history of modern culture is filled with examples of writers and artists who have found prominence chronicling what goes on behind the velvet rope even if they were reared far away from it, King has spent more time away from the gateways of recognition than most.

His success, though, has led him to inaugurate a new career as a maker of romantic comedies, a genre that has been wind-swept in recent years by a disgruntled heterosexual male point of view. His interests, as both Sex and the City and a second screenplay currently in progress exemplify, are not in the ways in which 28-year-olds collide into one another, but in the means by which love and identity can be reclaimed, the great theme of the so-called comedies of remarriage in the 1930s. In the film, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) has returned to the man she had broken up with a thousand times, Mr. Big (Chris Noth), whose name, we discover, is John James Preston, a nod to Preston Sturges, King’s most admired director.

The movie reunites Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall and the men who in the final seasons kept their characters enraged, enthralled, becalmed, bemused. Taking place as if four years have actually passed, it is King’s effort to illuminate the complications of happiness and the complexities of friendship as they mature. Carrie has remained with Mr. Big, but they have yet to get married, and she has kept her old apartment. (For the space to be recreated precisely as it was, Parker had to write a long plea to the directors of the Smithsonian to retrieve Carrie’s writing desk, now part of the institution’s permanent collection.)

“I think the worst thing of all would have been to keep the girls frozen in time,” King said, “picking things up right where we left off as if we’d just seen them all yesterday.”

One aspect of the women’s depiction that remains fixed is the sense that they have emerged from nowhere, with no lives to speak of before they were old enough for snakeskin and small dresses with tinier straps. While the film revolves around Carrie and Big’s wedding, King was insistent that no mother or father of the bride be shown. “My idea always was that these women were purely creations of New York,” he said. “The prototype of the series is that these are four grown-ups who make a family of one another.”

After dropping out of a small college in Pennsylvania at age 20, King, whose mother once ran a Krispy Kreme store, came to Manhattan and found work unloading cargo from Greyhound buses at the Port Authority terminal. “When I was a young person in New York, how many of my friends’ parents did I meet?” he said. “Not many.”

During the subsequent two decades King forged a financially insolvent life working as a standup comedian, a playwright, a television writer and, for a while, a theatrical producer in Los Angeles, using the money he made from television to finance plays that he banned critics from seeing.

There were stretches of good fortune: He worked as a writer on Murphy Brown, earning an Emmy nomination. But rent was an obligation he fulfilled sporadically even as he reached his mid-30s.

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Yet the fates who visit other struggling artists, casting doubt, begging them to consider marketing or sales or teaching preschool, never trespassed on King’s psyche. “I was never insanely confident in any kind of ‘I’m it and I’m just waiting for everyone to see it’ way, but I thought, I’ve worked this hard, it’s got to pay off, it’s just got to, if not in financial terms then somehow.”

King’s reward came when Darren Star, the creator of Sex and the City, hired him in 1997. When he eventually became the show’s chief producer, King wrote the first and last episodes of each season and guided his staff of writers through the creation of the interim episodes.

By the time the series ended, its four heroines had been taken from their frothy protracted adolescence and submerged into the adult world of anguish and aggrievement: Carrie in her stultifying relationship with the arrogant and self-isolating artist played by Mikhail Baryshnikov; Miranda in her obligations to her de facto husband’s ailing mother; Charlotte in her struggles with infertility; Samantha in her confrontation with breast cancer. The inauthentic atmosphere remained — the staggeringly high heels on cobblestone streets and the bills for the shoes that never materialized — but the emotional honesty deepened and prevailed.

While Sex and the City will leave a legacy that is largely sociological, easing as it did thousands of women from the shackling fears of spinsterhood, it was also one of the rare television comedies that got better and better as it progressed, veering from its initial sexual slapstick into a more meditative look at the readjusting of romantic expectation.

It is either the seriousness King displayed in the final seasons of Sex and the City or a general sense of bleakness among his fans that has led some to speculate that he might have a taste for a particularly morose strain of melodrama. “You don’t know how many people came up to me when I was making the movie and said, ‘So is somebody going to die?’ ” he said. “Yup. Happy summer. Thanks for your $10. Enjoy your Diet Coke. Someone’s going to die. Like that’s what I’m going to do.”