Eat, drink, diet

Maureen Dezell, The Boston Globe - October 26, 1998

The mind behind 'Bridget Jones' Helen Fielding, a singleton herself, shrugs off US uproar

"What would you have if you were having dessert?" asked Helen Fielding, arching an eyebrow as she scanned a menu of fruit-infused and dense chocolate concoctions.

Ordering anything quite so caloric was out of the question for the British journalist, author of "Bridget Jones's Diary". Her novel in diary form hummed away on American bestseller lists all summer, transmitting buzz phrases like "singleton" and "very Bridget Jones", both of which appear to have entered hip American parlance this fall. The book is still selling well - and upsetting cultural commentators convinced that Bridget, like Ally McBeal, is a paramount example of Women Behaving Badly.

As readers familiar with the not too terribly deep or dark secrets divulged in "Bridget Jones's Diary" know, Fielding's heroine faces many obstacles in her quotidian quest for self-improvement. The most formidable, though, is her fluctuating weight. At one point she laments: "129 pounds. How is it possible to put on 3 pounds in the middle of the night?" A onetime newspaper character turned international pop sensation, Bridget Jones is a 30-something London singleton bored to bits by her glam jobs in publishing and television. She obsesses about impossible, often unavailable, men and dismisses one who's smart, kind, and accomplished because he turns up at a party wearing a dweeby sweater. Her weekday mornings are arduous exercises in wardrobe indecision, filled with frantic searches for the single pair of black pantyhose in her drawer that isn't torn to shreds or twisted into a rope. Bridget and her lovelorn "mates" eat, drink, and smoke to excess. She frequently wakes up hung over or convinced she can "actually feel the fat splurging out of my body", or both. Fortunately, she is a mistress of good intentions: "Tomorrow, new Spartan health and beauty regimen will begin", she tells herself. And she believes it. She is, after all, an avid consumer of the sort of self-help advice dispensed in magazines like Cosmo, which she combs in search of role models - Susan Sarandon? Goldie Hawn? - who possess "inner poise."

Bridget is by no means a role model for our overachieving age. And that may explain her enormous appeal to singletons (and former singletons with a sense of humor). Exhausted by the demands of bleating cell phones, hard bodies, and Martha Stewart, women in particular take delight in the diversion of Bridget's daily logs of calories consumed ("can't even think about it"); alcohol units 7 ("oh, dear"); and minutes wasted looking in the mirror at wrinkles. A deftly executed urban comedy of manners - based loosely on "Pride and Prejudice" - "Bridget Jones's Diary" has sold more than a million copies in Britain, where "singleton has entered the vocabulary", Fielding was pleased to say when she visited Boston on a book tour. Indications were that "Smug Marrieds" - Bridget's term for her old-before-their-time friends who never tire of reminding her of her ticking biological clock - was wending its way into Cool Britannia vernacular. All for the better, according to Fielding, a composed, accomplished, well-put-together, 40-year-old London singleton herself. She said during a interview that she is quite put out by the tendency of "one section of society to make the other feel as though there's been a horrible mistake because they're not married".

Though "Bridget Jones's Diary" sold well throughout Western Europe, Fielding didn't expect the American edition, published in June, to take off as fast or as furiously as it did. American women hardly have a reputation for being indecisive or timid, she pointed out. Nonetheless, in every city she visited - "even New York!" - lawyers, commodities traders, and editors wearing expensive hairstyles and smart suits approached her to say: "I am Bridget Jones!"

Fielding, who's been finishing a sequel to the book and a screenplay based on it, hasn't been a witness to the not-very-great American debate about the sociocultural significance of the novel. The brouhaha began with Elizabeth Gleick - she, too, is Bridget Jones - getting positively giddy about the novel in the New York Times Book Review. Next, the usually urbane Alex Kuczynski announced in the Times Sunday Styles section: "Bridget Jones makes me ill. She gives me a headache," adding that she is an example of "learned helplessness thrust upon women." Meanwhile, Pulitzer-winning Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani voiced the received wisdom of the chattering classes: 'Bridget Jones is merely an Anglicized Ally McBeal'.

As Bridget would say, "Grrrrr."

The Bridget/Ally comparison is reductive, as might be expected in a society whose pundits routinely inveigh against books, TV shows, and movies they've only heard about. Bridget Jones may be more than a bit ditsy, but Fielding is not. Her novel is sophisticated and imbued with Oxbridge-honed levity and ironic detachment. Getting ready for a party, for example, Bridget thinks of celebrity editor Tina Brown, who is "brilliant at dealing with parties, gliding prettily from group to group, saying, 'Martin Amis! Nelson Mandela! Richard Gere! Have you met the most dazzling person at the party apart from you?'" Stepping outside a party full of Tina manques for a cigarette, she puffs away while listening to musicians playing "Viennese waltzes in a rather smart fin de millennium sort of way." It's possible that Ally McBeal's musings are as witty. But it's not bloody likely.

The Bridget/Ally bashing reached a zenith of sorts in an unintentionally hilarious Time magazine cover story reporting the most recently rumored death of feminism. The two characters, wrote Time writer Ginia Bellafante, "are presented as archetypes of single womanhood even though they are little more than composites of frivolous neuroses". Bellafante bemoaned the state of contemporary feminism, comparing it unfavorably to what she described as a vibrant, intellectually provocative feminist pop culture of the 1970s. "Feminism has devolved into the silly", she fumed. Well, some critics said Time's coverage of it had. Gazing out from the cover of the dead feminist issue were the faces of Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and - yes - Ally McBeal. As Calista Flockhart, who plays Ally, pointed out in a TV Guide interview last month, the mini-skirted lawyer is a fictional comic character: "To compare her to Susan B. Anthony is outrageous."

Fielding, for her part, shrugged off caustic comments about her effervescent Everywoman. "My first book was a cause celebre about a serious subject," she said. "It was set in Rwanda. Nobody bought it."

'Bridget Jones's Diary', by contrast, has become a franchise.

"I think it's because Bridget, like a lot of people, really just wants to get to all right," the author speculated. "She's so sort of ruthlessly honest about things most people won't admit. She's not narcissistic. She's quite warmhearted. She doesn't want to do anyone else down or pinch anyone else's boyfriend. She doesn't want to make loads of money. She just doesn't want to die alone in an apartment and be found half-eaten by a dog."

As for the Bridget/Ally analogy, Fielding demurred. "Ally's much thinner than Bridget," she said.