Bridget Creator Finds Fertile Ground in LA

By Marjorie Miller - Los Angeles Times, February 22, 2000

For the record, Helen Fielding had zero alcohol units and zero cigarettes at a Sunset Boulevard lunch, during which there was no calorie counting and no boyfriend talk.

In other words, the bestselling novelist is not Bridget Jones incarnate, even if some people do mistakenly call her by her 30-something heroine's name, and despite the fact she has just had a very Bridget-like experience with the roof of her new Hollywood house springing leaks in the manner of a garden hose ravaged by a great Dane.

"I am sure it will all be sorted out soon," Fielding said with the kind of optimism she admires in Californians.

Fielding, whose second diary, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, is to be published in the United States at the end of the month, recently moved to Los Angeles to the chagrin of her British friends and fans. It is tempting to ask how she could possibly trade Notting Hill chic at 192 - Bridget's favorite hangout - for L.A. hip at Cafe Med, except that we are seated outdoors on a spectacularly bright, sunny day in the middle of what only Californians could call winter.

"I love it here. Look at it, it's February. I swam this morning. It's half an hour to the beach and 40 minutes to the Wild West. I can be in the desert in 2 1/2 hours, and Mexico is two hours away on the plane. It's brilliant," Fielding said. "Especially for a writer, to come to L.A., well, even if things go wrong, there is so much to write about," she enthused.

Fielding finds it amusing that Angelenos complain about traffic - which does move, after all, and hardly compares to London gridlock. Or the way Californians go to pieces in the rain and refuse to come see her new house because it is wet outside, a condition that would turn Britain into an entire nation of shut-ins.

Then there is the positive, good-natured character of Californians, America's alternative to the stiff upper lip.

"As I was leaving a hotel in the desert, I told the woman working there that, by the way, the toilet is broken in the room. And she said, 'Oh, thank you, thank you so much for telling me. ' I imagine I could have said that my friend died and I left the body in the room, and she still would have said, 'Oh, fantastic, thank you, thank you so much, '" Fielding said with a laugh.

Fielding clearly is having a v. good time. And why shouldn't she? Bridget Jones's Diary sold 4 million copies in 30 countries, and the British edition of The Edge of Reason has sold nearly 500,000 since it was published in November. She is collaborating on the screenplay of Bridget Jones's Diary, to be directed by her friend Sharon Maguire for Working Title, which brought out Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill.

Bridget has spawned a slew of knockoff books, none of them as successful, and has added several words to the vocabulary of Chardonnay-chugging, urban singletons who identify with this bundle of insecurities trying to live up to impossible standards.

In her new diary, Bridget has traded diet books for self-help books and has a boyfriend, the rich and handsome Mark Darcy, whom she is trying to hang on to against the advances of gorgeous Rebecca, a villain "with thighs like a baby giraffe."

Telephone-addicted Bridget juggles her relationship with Mark along with the full-time demands of a manic boss, friends Shazzer, Jude and smug married Magda, and a zany mother who goes off to Africa to bring home a tribes man named Wellington.

Bridget then heads for Thailand, where she and Shazzer are conned by a Harrison Ford look-alike. She ends up in jail on drug charges, comforted only by the thought that she is shedding pounds.

Bridget II offers the same mix of neurosis and parody that attracted and irritated so many women, from London to Los Angeles to Tokyo, the first time around. But what exactly is it, Fielding is asked over salad and scallops, that makes so many women identify with Bridget?

"It is the gap between how you are and how you feel you are expected to be," Fielding said. "There are so many confusing images - wife, mother, Cosmo girl and career woman with the body of an anorexic teenager. Even high-powered New York women in business suits identify with her not being able to find a pair of tights in the morning. "This feeling of not being as you are supposed to be seems to be pretty universal," she said.

Many professional women in their mid-30s have had to make difficult choices in their lives, among them, perhaps, the decision not to marry, she said.

"For these women to then be subjected to comments from an uncle like, "What, still not married?" or about being on the shelf past your sell-by date, it's just not fair."

While the plot of the first book comes from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, the second borrows heavily from Persuasion. Both stories, Fielding noted, were "well market-researched over a number of centuries."

But many feminists who love Jane Austen hate Bridget Jones, which portrays modern women squandering their hard-fought freedom on worrying about thigh size and sell-by dates.

"I don't think it's good, but it's true," Fielding said. "If it hadn't hit a true note, the book wouldn't have sold as it did. But the women buying it are not anti-feminist. It's a mark of strength to laugh at yourself."

Besides, she noted with characteristic irony, her weightier endeavors on refugee camps in Africa - her first book, Cause Celeb - and a proposal on cultural clashes in the Caribbean have not been as popular. Not to mention those sincere newspaper articles she used to write on the future of the British countryside.

The British press reported that Fielding did not want to write a sequel to Bridget Jones, but caved in to her publishers. Fielding said she was not opposed but feared she might not be able to sustain the character who sprang out of a newspaper column in 1995 without any expectations.

She squeezed the writing into a frenetic schedule of publicity trips to Spain and Japan and delivered the manuscript 77 weeks late.

Part of the appeal of Los Angeles for Fielding is that it offers her a calmer lifestyle than London does after the intensity of Bridget's success.

"I really like it. All of the phone calls [from London] stop at 10 a.m. and I can start writing," she said.

Fielding had planned to take a break, but Los Angeles is proving too fertile a ground.

"I can't help it. I already have got piles of notes and interesting characters to think about," she said. "There are all these man-women walking around with the bottom half of a boy and then these enormous breasts. How can it be? I feel I am from a different species.

"If you order potatoes au gratin or something like that in a restaurant, the waiter will look at you" - and here Fielding gives a look as if you are about to imbibe motor oil - "and he'll say, 'You know, that contains dairy. ' This, of course, is hilarious to someone from a country that offers up a "chip sandwich," which is white bread smeared in butter and filled with French fries cooked in beef fat. "

So where does all this lead? What is Fielding working on now?

"Oh," she said, "getting the roof fixed."