Sighs of a Singleton

 

By Tamsin Todd, Washington Post Book World - July 5, 1998

 

Dear Bridget: So you're off to the States. It's about time. You've gone as far as you can in England. What started as a newspaper column - the diary of a single 30-something ("singleton") Londoner - turned into a phenomenon. You've topped the fiction bestseller lists for almost a year [with Bridget Jones's Diary]. Your name's an adjective, verb and noun, all at once. ("That's very Bridget Jones"; "I pulled a Bridget Jones last night"). You're the most popular girl in Britain - how can you possibly go wrong in America?

 

It's good your American editors haven't asked you to change for your new readers. You're not - like your skeletony American cousin Ally McBeal - perfectly coiffed. You eat too much, get hangovers, smoke cigarettes by the pack. You sleep with your boss and go on dates with randy 23-year-olds. And when you get introduced to the perfect man you manage to make a complete mess of it. Your diary records it all: "Friday 19 May. 124 1/2 lbs. (have lost 3 lbs., 8 oz. literally overnight - must have eaten food which uses up more calories to eat it than it gives off e.g. v. chewy lettuce), alcohol units 4 (modest), cigarettes 21 (bad), lottery tickets 4 (not v.g.)."

 

Your life can be - let's face it - pretty miserable. Smug married friends pair you up with morons at dinner parties. ("All the decent chaps have been snapped up," they inform you.) You're expected to coo over friends' babies on Sunday afternoons, despite your massive hangover. You're constantly fielding maternal interrogations - when are you going to get married? To whom? And when the going gets tough, where do you turn for advice? To your long-married mother? Your gay friend Tom? Cosmo? Susan Faludi? Feng Shui?

 

But you have Helen Fielding. You really couldn't have chosen a better creator. Her account of your blunders and triumphs is achingly funny - yet still sympathetic. She's a clever enough writer to get readers to laugh with you, Bridget, not at you. And she has an Austenian knack for picking out the telling comic detail - whether it's the name of your nosy, noisy boss (Perpetua), or your bungled attempt to work the crowd at a trendy publishing party. I laughed out loud the second time I read your diary.

 

The great thing about you, Bridget, is you've got universal appeal. Who doesn't want to get the perfect job, attract the perfect mate, behave perfectly in all situations, exercise more, eat less, give more to charity, and be, as you put it, a "perfect saint-style person"? Who hasn't mangled a dinner party or made a thousand New Year's resolutions ("Go to gym three times a week not merely to buy sandwich," "Form functional relationship with responsible adult"), only to break them on New Year's Day?

 

Of course there will be people who don't like you. American girls, as Henry James was constantly reminding us, are different from English girls. American girls are supposed to behave well. They don't drink as much as you; they put on makeup in the morning, they're taught to go on dates with boys before they kiss them. The Rules - which toed the don't-kiss-a-boy-until-he's-proposed line - was a smash hit in America last year. Rules girls won't like you, Bridget. They'll call you alcoholic, or obsessive, or neurotic. And those new puritans, the feminists - they'll give you trouble too. They won't like your self-deprecating humor. They'll say you're insecure and a poor role model for women. They'll call you an advertiser's plaything - a lipsticked, short-skirted women's mag-reading flirt who'd happily trade in her career for Mr. Right.

 

Don't listen to them, Bridget. You may not be the stuff of feminists' dreams, but you're not shortsighted either. You know you've got choices and you sometimes make bad decisions. But you also know there's fun to be found in even the most disastrous situations. You're not a complainer. You're working out how to live as a single adult with humor and optimism. And America's filled with singletons doing the same thing. They'll be delighted to hear from you - and so will anyone who's ever been, or known, a singleton. The only way you can blunder this one, Bridget, is by staying home. So you go, girl.