The Bridget invasion:
a London diary hits home

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."