Single White Female

By Shane Watson, Harper's Bazaar - July, 1998.

The name Bridget Jones may not be familiar in the U.S. - yet - but in Britain she is as famous as the Spice Girls. Three years ago the fictional diary of a single girl became a weekly newspaper column in The Independent, and Bridget Jones was born. Thirty-something, attractive, working in the media and living alone in Notting Hill (London's answer to Manhattan's West Village), she is a regular working girl and, at the same time, the skeleton in the closet of the modern superwoman: imperfect, vulnerable, obsessed with unworthy men, incapable of saying no to another glass of chardonnay and 10 cigarettes. From her inception, Bridget did not so much speak to her readers as move in with them and become their soulmate. When the novel Bridget Jones's Diary (Viking) followed in the fall of 1996, Bridget's cult success boiled over into a phenomenon. A sequel is planned, a movie version from the makers of Four Weddings and a Funeral is in preproduction, and her creator, Helen Fielding, has become a millionaire.

The real measure of Bridget's impact, however, is the way that she has entered the British language, as in "very Bridget Jones, very 30-something single." The B.J. syndrome has spawned countless television documentaries and magazine articles. Spinsters have been renamed "singletons," as Bridget calls them, and unmarried 30-somethings have acquired a sense of cool camaraderie.

Bridget is a wonderfully quirky comic creation. "Completely exhausted by an entire day of date preparation," she writes in the diary. "Being a woman is worse than being a farmer - there is so much harvesting and crop spraying to be done." To come up with a character who is lovable, ingenuous and a crack social commentator called for a mixture of kooky wit and razor-sharp professionalism. Fielding fits both categories: short skirt, impish smile, with an open carton of cookies on her desk, but at the same time poised and smart. "People are always asking whether I'm Bridget, and it is a bit odd because I don't know whether to say. 'No, of course I'm not Bridget, I'm a media bitch from hell, and it's all sorted,' or [in a small, tired voice] 'Yes, I am.' The truth, she says, lies somewhere between the two.

Like Bridget, Fielding is single and attractive, lives alone in Notting Hill and was, until Diary took over, a writer working in the media. She is also (unlike Bridget) an Oxford graduate whose close friends include key members of the British comic establishment and a few TV personalities. (Four Weddings writer Richard Curtis is an ex-boyfriend.) 

As Bridget is launched onto the American public this month, how will the character be received in a country where self-nurturing and the having-it-all philosophy are alive and kicking? As far as Fielding is concerned, it's not Bridget's singleness or timeliness or intemperance that is the secret of Diary's success. "I think the character works because she is honest and not trying to create a good impression. It might come as a relief to American women that this is a book about somebody being as crap as everyone is, who isn't pretending to be gorgeous, poised and having-it-all perfect, and that it's a best-seller. So maybe it's okay not to be a superwoman." Fielding flashes her mischievous grin. "Would you like a Nicorette?"