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. |