The
Bridget invasion: By Sarah Van Boven, Newsweek - May 4, 1998 THANK
GOODNESS BRIDGET JONES can't keep her New Year's resolutions. The heroine of
Helen Fielding's runaway British best seller first appears in "Bridget
Jones's Diary" making solemn promises: she will "go to gym three
times a week not merely to buy sandwich." She will not smoke, drink too
much or "obsess about Daniel Cleaver, as pathetic to have crush on boss
in manner of Miss Moneypenny or similar." But she fails gloriously. The
fictional diary entries that follow begin with lists like this one:
"Sunday, 26 February, 126 lbs., alcohol units 5 (drowning sorrows),
cigarettes 23 (fumigating sorrows), calories 3856 (smothering sorrows in fat
duvet)." Bridget's post-feminist sorrows could be tedious in the hands of
a less charming writer-they include such trivialities as the inability to find
a pair of tights in her bureau without holes or bits of tissue stuck all over
them. But Fielding has managed to create an unforgettably droll character.
Ally McBeal had better watch her scrawny little back - in June, Bridget Jones
is coming to America. Early
indications suggest she'll get a warm welcome. In New York and beyond, women
are lending purloined proofs of Viking's American edition and British copies
to friends with "you've got to read this" notes attached. Back home,
Fielding's novel is a certified smash. The
former BBC producer created Bridget in 1995, when an editor at The Independent
asked her to contribute a column to the paper. At first she didn't tell
coworkers - "These were people writing very serious political stories
about New Labour," says Fielding, 39. After the column proved hugely
popular, she wrote "Bridget Jones's Diary," basing the story on
"Pride and Prejudice." ("There's several hundred years of
market testing on that plot," she says.) A
year and a half and 900,000 copies later, Bridget is quite literally the talk
of London. Erratic, hedonistic behavior is described as "very Bridget
Jones." Bachelorettes now self-identify as "singletons," and
disparage the "smug marrieds" who maliciously inquire after their
love lives. Bridgetmania will only be heightened by a film adaptation from the
"Four Weddings and a Funeral" team and by two book-sequels. "I
have girls coming up to me at parties saying. 'I am Bridget Jones. I am
her!'" marvels Fielding. "What am I sup- posed to say? 'Bless you,
my child. If you aren't Bridget, you are at the very least quite drunk'."
In
fact, all those alcohol units and cigarettes do have some fans worrying about
how Bridget will fare in fitness-obsessed America when Viking's hardcover
edition hits stores in June. Expat writer Christopher Hitchens penned an open
letter to the character in the Evening Standard warning that over here,
"babes are not problem-oriented. They are solution-obsessed. Do you have
a solution? I thought not." But Fielding is hopeful that the humor will
translate. "It's funny how Brits think Americans don't understand
self-deprecation and irony," she says. "It just can't be true- look
at Woody Allen." Fielding
seems excited, if nervous, about her upcoming publicity tour. "It'll be
one interview after another," she says. "I worry that it'll get to
be midnight and when the tenth person asks 'So, are you Bridget Jones?' I'll
just burst out with 'Oh, go f--yourself!" Here's hoping you do, Helen. As Bridget herself so aptly put it in a recent column in The Daily Telegraph, "Self-discipline is not everything. Look at Pol Pot." |