The Bridget Jones effect:
How
life has changed for the single woman
By Helen Fielding | The Guardian - December
20, 2013
Tweeting,
online dating, parenthood – Helen Fielding reveals how in her new book
she hopes to do for the middle-aged woman what her first Bridget
novel did for the thirtysomething singleton.
Photograph: Geoff Pugh/REX
The fact that Bridget Jones
became popular was unexpected to me, and everyone else involved. The
moment I began to understand why was in Tokyo, in the strangeness
of my first book tour. A strikingly glamorous, thin, beautiful,
successful news presenter told me that she totally identified with
feeling fat and not good enough. She seemed so perfect – and clearly
only existed on little bits of fish. It’s possible that something
may have got lost in translation. (After all, a reviewer of the
Italian translation of Bridget Jones’s Diary described
it as “a transcendental study of existential despair”.)
But I suspected that what Bridget had unwittingly tapped into was
the gap between how people feel they are expected to be on the outside
and how they actually feel inside.
I didn’t start writing Bridget with any grand scheme
or social themes in mind. She wasn’t supposed to be the secretary of
state for women, or anything. I was struggling with my second unreadable
novel about cultural divides in the Caribbean and trying to get
freelance articles accepted by various newspapers. The Independent asked
me to write a column as myself, which was great, as I was broke. But,
being quite a private person, I thought it would be hopelessly
embarrassing and exposing. I agreed, instead, to make up a character and
write the column anonymously.
I told no one at first, and assumed it would be nixed after six
weeks for being too silly. The people sitting on the desk with me were
writing about politics and Chechenyaaaaa. I was writing about how many
more calories there were in an olive than a Malteser (it depends on the
size and type of the olive). But interest grew. Letters began to arrive
for the editor, one of them – rather formal – saying:
“Dear Sir,
I would quite like to shag Bridget Jones. Could you let me have her
phone number please?”
Many thanks,
Yours faithfully …
My publishers decided Bridget
Jones might be a better bet than the unreadable second novel, and
then things slowly began to snowball and bestsellerdom, movies and book
tours followed. Talk about being exposed! I spent years and years
denying that Bridget had anything to do with me, quipping
self-defensively: “I don’t drink or smoke and I am a virgin.”
A lot of books in a similar vein followed Bridget, mainly
with pink covers, to the point where I was dubbed by Barbara Walters the
“grandmother” of chick-lit. I assume she meant to say
“godmother”. But I don’t think it was imitation: it was
zeitgeist.
Back in the mid-1990s the way single women in their 30s were
presented socially – and certainly in books and films – hadn’t
caught up with reality. The air of Miss Havisham and the tragic barren
spinster left on the shelf was still hanging around us. The film Fatal
Attraction presented the single 36-year-old as a desperate
bunny boiler. Friends of one’s parents would whisper: “Why aren’t
you married?” in tones of appalled dismay.
We weren’t Miss Havisham or bunny boilers. We were products of a new
generation, with our own flats, cars, incomes and expectations. We
weren’t single because – as Bridget joked – “underneath our
clothes our entire bodies are covered in scales”: we just didn’t
need to settle for someone who wasn’t right, simply to keep life
afloat.
I think it’s still very hard for women in their 30s to figure out the
career/dating/babies issues – no one has fixed the biological
clock yet. And embarrassingly, after I’d boasted about it, it
turned out it wasn’t me who had coined the term “singleton”,
but PG Wodehouse. But at least, since Bridget,
thirtysomething singletons are no longer saddled with Miss Havisham as a
role model.
It went beyond the singleton issue, though. The thing about writing
anonymously is that it frees you up to be honest. Details that I thought
were just unique to me – such as seeing if you weighed less without
your watch on, or having a very confused knowledge about what was
going on in Chechenyaaaaa (and how to spell it) in spite of
being a professional woman, or deciding you were going to end up dying
alone and being eaten by a dog because somebody hadn’t called –
turned out to be the sort of thing that millions of other women
identified with.
It was strange, yet reassuring. When I was doing the publicity, I still
thought I was fat and saying the wrong thing, and somehow as if I was
wearing wellingtons on the red carpet. But I knew I wasn’t the
only person infected with the idea that I should look like someone out
of a magazine. I knew that what the fans of Bridget were really
responding to, amid the inundation of images of perfection, was
that it’s actually alright to be human, just to sort of muddle along,
try to do things right, be nice to your friends, and laugh about what
goes wrong on the way.
There was a certain amount of indignation among anxious feminists. One
of my favourite lines from the first book was “There is nothing so
unattractive to a man as strident feminism” – and I could see how
this sort of thing would annoy you, if you weren’t a fan of
irony. But my feeling was, and is, if women aren’t allowed to
laugh at themselves, they haven’t got very far on the equality front,
have they?
I wrote the bulk of Mad About the Boy, the new Bridget book,
in the same armchair in which I wrote the first one, and in much the
same position, with the laptop on my knee. With the first book, I was
unselfconscious because no one was particularly interested; with Mad
About the Boy it was because I hadn’t told anyone I was
writing it. That was the only way I could write it, so I could be honest
about what I felt was going on, without worrying what everyone would
think. It happened quite organically. There were new things that were
making me laugh in London and new things I wanted to write about:
unexploded email box bombs, tweeting, Botox, over-stuffed lives, online
dating, how to lose your born-again virginity, juggling work and
parenthood, the way the image of (ugh) the “middle-aged” woman is as
outdated and mean as the tragic barren spinster was when Bridget was
first struggling with it.
I didn’t intend it to be a Bridget book at first, but I started
to realise I was writing in her voice. And just as a thirtysomething
Bridget felt a huge gap between how she was expected to be and how she
was, an older Bridget was finding that, with all the losses,
sadnesses and wonderful surprises of life, there’s a big gap
between how you expect life to be and how it actually turns out.
People were wildly indignant at first that Bridget had grown older and
things had changed. I was startled when watching the BBC news in my PJs,
during reporting on the Syrian crisis I saw the headline
“Mark Darcy is Dead!” But I was also very touched. How many
writers create characters that people still care about after so long and
feel such ownership of? I couldn’t have just churned out a
watered-down version of the same thing. The world changes, people have
tough stuff to deal with in life. There are dark notes and light notes,
we all get through by supporting each other and laughing when we can.
That’s how Bridget operates – like one of your friends. The jokes in Bridget
Jones must have their roots in honesty and truth. And the fact
that the book is, after 10
weeks, No 1 in the hardback fiction bestseller lists shows that when people actually read it, they understand and care
about her still.
I never expected an anonymous column to turn out as it did, and it was a
wonderful thing to happen to a freelance journalist. It’s more
wonderful still if Bridget has done something to counteract the culture
of perfection and make people feel it’s alright just to be
alright. I wonder where the perfect Japanese news presenter is. I bet
her life didn’t turn out like she expected, any more than Bridget’s
– and I hope that, like Bridget, she will be managing to keep
buggering on, play with the cards she is dealt, and laughing with
her friends, who will tell her that she’s absolutely fine –
just as she is.
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