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Bethenny Frankel’s rumored return to The Real Housewives of New York City has been confirmed, with the star saying she’s both excited and nervous for it.

The straight-talking, business-savvy brunette is returning to The Real Housewives of New York City for the show’s seventh season, to air early next year.

“I’m excited,” Frankel, 43, says, apparently over her Vietnam-style flashbacks. “It feels like the first season when it was fresh and new and unknown.”

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Carole Radziwill, Heather Thomson, Kristen Taekman, LuAnn de Lesseps, Ramona Singer and Sonja Morgan will be back, too, a rep for the show says.

After leaving the Housewives in 2010, Frankel initially stayed in reality TV, starring in Bravo’s Bethenny Getting Married followed by Bethenny Ever After.

Both reality ventures chronicled her marriage to and increasingly rocky relationship with Jason Hoppy, with whom she later warred over child custody.

 

Her short-lived eponymous talk show Bethenny ended after one season, but her Skinnygirl cocktail empire has been valued in the tens of millions.

“I felt very constricted and very handled,” Frankel says of daytime television and how it wasn’t the best fit, whereas “reality TV was very freeing for me.”

She admits this form of entertainment “can be challenging, stressful and often toxic, just like life … but for me, personally, reality TV is a great vehicle.”

We’ll see if she’s still singing that tune a year from now, but we’ll watch The Real Housewives of New York City online to find out, that’s for certain.

As for who will be joining her, Frankel says “the band is not back together,” referencing co-stars Alex McCord, LuAnn de Lesseps and Ramona Singer.

“There are some of us who will be back together, but not everyone.”

It’s unclear if former enemy Jill Zarin will be back alongside her.

As for how she’ll approach things differently this time around?

Bethenny says she realizes more now how “the decisions I make affect other people … some things about my personal life will remain private.”

No parading around in Bryn’s jammies in other words.