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Dear Diary &
That Would Be Comic Novel Bridget Jones's Diary By Tim
Engle - Kansas City Star, June 10, 1999 5:15 p.m. Even though resolved NOT to imitate Bridget Jones
diary entry (like every other journalist), cannot resist. Blimey! Am horribly
uncreative. Is Helen Fielding ringing me up at 5:30 my time or 5:30 her time?
Never can figure out bloody time differences. Plan to inquire about love life
- but will ask at END of interview (v.v. smart, I think). Hope stupid tape
recorder works. Aargh. She's a single career woman living in the
city who obsessively tracks her weight, exchanges flirty e-mails with a guy
in the office, and has to put up with a meddling mother and "Smug
Married" pals who are constantly trying to fix her up. It's Bridget Jones, actually, the
unlucky-at-a-lot-of-things "Singleton" - not spinster, thank you
very much - who obviously has sisters all over the world. Bridget is the
loopy, 30-something heroine of Bridget Jones's Diary, the comic novel that
was a hit in Britain and then crossed the ocean last summer to become a
publishing sensation here, too. It's now in paperback, and author Helen
Fielding has again hit the book-tour circuit. She'll be in Kansas City on
Friday. There's news on the Bridget front: The people
behind Four Weddings and a Funeral and the new movie Notting Hill snagged the
film rights to Fielding's book; she has written a couple of drafts of the
screenplay. Who will play Bridget? Names like Minnie Driver and Helena Bonham
Carter have been bounced around, but Fielding would like to see an unknown
get the part ("I don't really want it to be a terribly thin young
actress," she says). Fielding, a former newspaper writer and BBC
producer, is also working on a Bridget sequel. She should have plenty of
material: Jones's misadventures started out as a London newspaper column,
which Fielding continued to write for three years after she'd finished the
book. And just in case you're wondering, Helen
Fielding says she is not Bridget Jones: "I think a lot of people expect
me to be her and sort of fall off the chair in a drunken heap, giggling. But
often I have to disappoint them." We caught up with the
something-over-30 author (recent articles say she's 40; Fielding is
charmingly vague on the subject) by phone from Sacramento, Calif., recently. So, are a lot of women like Bridget? When I started writing it, it was a pretty
unself-conscious thing. I was just writing a column for a newspaper, which I assumed
would last about six weeks and that would be the end of it. But after the
success of the column, and then the book, I realized there were an awful lot
of women out there who shared Bridget's insecurities and constant doomed
quest for self-improvement. The book is a comic novel, but apparently
there's a lot of truth behind the funny lines. That would seem to be the case. Originally I
was just trying to make people laugh and write a bit about life in London. Especially in big cities, a lot of people are
single. It's a pretty normal way to live. Most people will be single at some
point in their lives, and (many) tend to live in urban families with their
Singleton friends and their Smug Married friends and their gay friends. Also
there's this thing of the Smug Marrieds persisting in the idea that there's
been a mistake if someone's single: "How's your love life? Why aren't
you married yet?" And of course what Bridget always wants to say is,
"How's your marriage going? Still having sex?" It's been said that your book's success has
spawned a whole wave of books about neurotic, 30-ish single women. Are you
proud? I don't think I'm really responsible. I think
it's Zeitgeist. If you have an idea, chances are so will 200 other people,
and 10 of them will be writers, you know? Because I started to do mine as a
column, I got a bit of a head start. It's much quicker to get a column
published than it is to get a book published. It's no bad thing, people
writing about women's lives as they really are. Women are very good at
laughing at themselves. There's been a lot of analysis of this book.
Some critics have said Bridget the character is "a mess" and worse.
Do you view her as pathetic at all? No, I'm very fond of her as a character. It's
a very ironic book. I think if you're not fond of irony as a form
of expression, then a book which contains the line, "There's nothing so
unattractive to a man as strident feminism," will probably annoy you. I
think the job of a novelist is not to write propaganda but to reflect what's
really going on. And the thing about Bridget is, she does have all these
insecurities, but she also has a great capacity to pick herself up and (hatch)
a new plan. Her ups and downs, I think, are sort of exaggerated versions of
the secret thoughts that go on inside an awful lot of people. What do men think of Bridget Jones? Well, when I first started writing the
column, nobody knew it was me, so lots of men thought she was a real person.
I did get some very funny letters. There was one man who wrote a very serious
letter to the editor of the Independent newspaper, saying, "Dear sir, I
would quite like to shag Bridget Jones. Could you let me have her phone
number, please? Many thanks." In the U.K., it was mainly women to start
with who were reading the book, but now there's a sort of new wave of men
whose girlfriends or wives have given it to them and said, if you want to
know how women's minds work, read this book. It's a horrible responsibility,
really. Finally, I've got to ask: How's your love
life these days? Have you settled down yet? (Laughs) How's your marriage going? Still
having sex? |