Mad about the girl  

Chandreyee Chatterjee | The Telegraph India – February 11, 2018

She’s smart, sassy and, well, a lot more glamorous than you’d expect the heroine of her cult first novel, Bridget Jones’s Diary, to be. But at heart, Helen Fielding is Bridget Jones.

She came to India years ago as a backpacking hippie, stayed in hostels, travelled on trains and loved all of it. “I was in my 30s and I was very giddy and giggly,” said Helen Fielding, the writer of Bridget Jones’s Diary – the cult book series that spawned three movies – in a session at the Zee Jaipur Literature Festival held in January. Looking “pure”, as she laughingly put it, in a white short dress, she could very well be Bridget Jones from her third book, Mad About The Boy. Not just because she is blonde and in her 50s but because she has the same self-deprecatory humour that cracks you up just like her books do. 

The British author describes her journey with Bridget Jones in her inimitable style...

AN HONEST SERIES OF THOUGHTS ON MY LIFE 

When I started writing Bridget Jones’s Diary, it was an anonymous column in a newspaper. I was very broke and I was a journalist. I really thought that I was writing the column to pay the mortgage, while I wrote my very serious book about cultural divides in the Caribbean. (Laughs) If I had known so many people would have read it, I would have never dared write it. 

Tragically, I’ve always wanted to be taken seriously. Many people complain that Bridget Jones is silly, I actually disagree. One Italian reviewer once said, ‘It was a transcendental study of existential despair.’ It could have been a translation issue, but I’m going with the Italians on that. (Laughs)

I think it was that freedom from self-consciousness that allowed me to be honest. I think in an open world now with so much Facebook and Instagram and so much emphasis on presenting perfection and versions of people that don’t really exist, the best picture, the best moment, that what is neglected is how you really feel inside. I think Bridget was the gap between how we all feel we are expected to be and how we actually are. And I think that was the little thing at the heart that without me even knowing I was doing it, accidentally, caught people’s attention.

I think I was writing from the inside rather than from the outside. When I started writing it was just a diary, and it was just an honest series of thoughts on my life as a journalist in my 30s. I kind of based it on my university diaries, which consisted a list of food. It would be sort of ‘carrots - 10 calories; yoghurt - 100 calories; box of milk silk chocolates - 3, 384 calories’. It was a sort of an unconscious internal monologue, and I think it just came from there. It wasn’t really planned. 

I was doing this column casually and I had a friend who had a friend who was always getting into trouble with boys and she was called Bridget. And I thought I would call her Jones. It never occurred to me that I was called Fielding and that there was an author called Henry Fielding who had written Tom Jones. So later I tried to pretend it was literary allusion but actually it really wasn’t. (Laughs)

PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS CALLING ME BRIDGET

Well, I used to deny that Bridget had anything to do with me at all, and say that I don’t drink or smoke or that I’m a virgin. (Laughs) I was writing the column for The Independent newspaper and they wanted me to write it as myself and I said no, because ironically enough that would be too exposing and embarrassing. 

I was writing on the political desks and everyone was writing about Chechnya and that sort of thing, so I didn’t tell anyone it’s me (writing the Bridget column) because it seemed silly. After about six weeks, people started to praise the column, including some of my friends, and being as shallow as a pebble, I at that point said it’s me! And started to boast about the column. (Laughs) And then we got more and more letters, including my favourite, which was to the editor of The Independent, and it said: “Dear sir, I would quite like to shag Bridget Jones, could you let me have her phone number please? Many, thanks, yours faithfully”. Very, very polite.

People are always calling me Bridget and apologising. I did start an Instagram account which only consisted of food that I had burnt or ruined. But I don’t think the Bridget I originally wrote would pull it together to go on a book tour. I think I have seen a lot more of the world now than she has, but I hope I still keep sort of her childlike wonder.

I am constantly trying to write outside Bridget. The fourth book Mad About The Boy, I didn’t intend to be a Bridget book, but it just turned into that voice. So I just think it is a voice I’m very comfortable with, because I think in some way it is my own voice and the way she sees things is the way I see things. I think she is quite clear-sighted, but a bit daft as well and optimistic about things, which isn’t a bad way of looking at life. But I would like to try other things. I have been spending time in Los Angeles and I’d like to write something about Los Angeles but it is a hard city to write about. It is an easy target if you are trying to be funny, but I do know better now, so that might be a way around.

MY MUM, HER MUM

Well, some of Bridget’s mother (Pamela) was based on my mother’s turn of phrase, which I would always find very funny. It is so complicated, it is a sort of Northern England thing. So once I took her to a restaurant, a very fancy restaurant, and they had profiteroles. She is a cookery teacher and she said, ‘Well, if I’d made these I would consider them a failure. I would have thrown them away and opened a tin of pear.’ So she is very precise and she talks a lot about food. 

Bridget’s mum is from that post-war generation where much of the vocabulary is infused with food. And they are very specific about colours, so it would be like crushed raspberry or burnt plum. But I also think that Bridget’s mum comes from a generation where they are very certain about everything. 

They are caught up in one place with one set of values, after the war, and it is very much that sort of British thing that if you work hard and be honest, then everything will be fine and that is what we are going to do. 

And Bridget, the next generation, was suddenly in this explosion of media and all these ideas of all these different things you could be. You could be a wife, a mother, a businesswoman, a feminist, you could be a star, you could be famous… the two of them together represent two very different eras. 

The other thing about Bridget’s mother, which I actually explored more in the later books and also in the musical I’ve been working on, is that she constantly undermines her daughter by trying to change her, and trying to suggest that she wear something else or eat something else or do something else. And I think that’s a stereotype lots of women are familiar with.

BEFORE BRIDGET JONES

My first book [Cause Celeb] was actually set in a refugee camp in Sudan, but nobody bought that one. I was a journalist for a long time working in East Africa, my sister lived in Kenya for a long time, and during the late ’80s famines I went out to those camps on the East Coast. So the book I wrote was about how celebrities and famine depend on each other.

It is an oddly symbiotic relationship. 

AFTER BRIDGET JONES

The success didn’t happen very suddenly. It was sort of a slow burn. When the book first went to number one, I was so excited. I’ve still got the Sunday Times with the list. I stuck it inside the lid of a box, coz I didn’t want anyone to see me hanging it up. Initially I think I just panicked and kept everything the same. Same car that kept breaking down, same flat, same friends, and then I gradually expanded. I still felt that if I bought a handbag, all the money would go away. 

It is quite hard to adjust. Money is a strange thing. But it was a wonderful thing to happen to any freelance journalist. 

In terms of feeling sort of oppressed by expectation, what I do is that I just avoid that. So if I am writing a Bridget book, I don’t tell anyone. I just sit quietly and write it on my own until it’s ready and then I show it to someone, because otherwise I would get too self-conscious. 

THE WRITING PROCESS

I always wanted to be that person who’s very organised and sits at a white table with a single white flower and laptop and writes for three hours every day. But I am quite chaotic in the sense that at the moment, for example, I probably have three ideas going, and I am trying to get them to go and scribbling things down and none of them are quite working. 

But then when one of them gets going, I just splurge down all the material, most of which I won’t use, but it’s very cathartic and quite emotional stuff. 

And then I’ll go back and look at it and decide what it is and highlight things that are funny and ask myself what it means and what it’s about and then really ditch all the rest and go back and structure it. And then there’s a delicious phase where I’m making a tapestry really because I find all these threads that work together. 

So when something like Bridget is finished, it looks really frothy and light but actually underneath it, it’s quite carefully structured. You’ve got your theme at the bottom and then you’ve got all your characters, and then you’ve got all the jokes that are tied into the theme, and it’s got a proper three-act structure.

Usually when I start writing and I’ve got a blank page, I tend to panic. Then instead of sitting at home and feeling insecure, I’ll go to a cafe where other people are writing and I think ‘Oh my god, I have had so many things published’ and I feel really good about myself (laughs) and it boosts my confidence.

FRIENDS ARE FAMILY FOR BRIDGET

People need family and they need community and it has been proved by surveys, as Bridget always says, that one of the sources of happiness is community. So people just evolve and construct their families out of their surroundings. 

So in Bridget’s instance, her girlfriends, her gay friends, her Smug Married friends, her friends in the city become her family. Her birth family lives somewhere else, and that’s very often true for people living in the cities. Often we go around saying ‘oh I am alone’, Bridget does that and ‘oh I don’t have a husband’, and then your friends would come around and say ‘what are you talking about’ because they are there just as any family is. Except that they are selected family. It is quite a social movement in a way. 

I think that’s another thing about Bridget Jones in the social media age. Social media generally does not celebrate friendship, loyalty, or supportiveness. Those sorts of things don’t tend to come out in an Instagram post. And I think what is touching to me about the reaction to Bridget is that she is all about warmth, humanity, imperfection, vulnerability, but she is kind and it is really important increasingly in the world that those qualities are not forgotten and not diminished. 

DATING IS LIKE WAR

I think [Bridget would face] essentially the same problems, but technology makes them ever more complex. I spent four hours one morning interpreting texts that a friend of mine was getting from a gentleman caller. We spent hours discussing it, discussing the replies and analysing it.

I think whether it is sort of now or Jane Austen’s day, there’s always a code. People tend to talk in code when they are dating and it is all guessing and second-guessing. I think that’s very good if you are a novelist, because it adds to the suspense but it is not so good if you are the person dating, because it is very difficult for men and women to understand what the other person means or wants. 

And Bridget often observes dating is like a war. It’s like being a general planning strategies. And I think with all these different apps, certainly with teenagers now, they almost don’t bother to meet in public. And they are horrified if you ring up, if you actually telephone them! 

Bridget did try Twitter in Mad About The Boy. I did Twitter for three months to see how bad it could be. So she did the classic thing of tweeting when drunk, and she went into a whole thing about birds and how she hated birds and then in the morning she had to apologise about birds in general. I think she would struggle with getting carried away after having a few glasses of wine and getting online. 

Online dating, in one way, is quite sensible because it is better than people going into a bar and saying, ‘Oh, how much do you mind if I don’t like running on the beach and I am vaguely out of shape?’ but I think it has become like online shopping. I’ve had people report that they’ve gone to the grocery store and got upset because the things they put in their baskets didn’t wink back at them. 

THE IDEA OF THE TRAGIC, BARREN SPINSTER

In terms of something like Bridget Jones’s Diary – which is reflecting a trend in society clearly because so many people would not have bought that book if it hadn’t zeroed in on something that is out of step in the way that women were being presented, from how they actually were – I think society is full of oppressive stereotypes of women and the idea of the tragic, barren spinster, the Miss Havisham figure representing a woman in her 30s who is not married, was hopelessly outdated in 1996 and needed to be addressed. 

A single woman in her 30s did not have an identity at that point that wasn’t vaguely embarrassing and shameful, and that is ridiculous. The fact that you can take that identity and give it a name, give it a personality and explore and talk about it, is very helpful. It wasn’t intentional on my part but I was very, very pleased that other people started writing the same sort of thing and identified with it. 

UNDERSTANDING IRONY 

When I first took Bridget Jones’s Diary to America, there was an open letter in the Evening Standard from Christopher Hitchens who said, don’t take it to America, they won’t understand. They don’t understand irony, or self-deprecation. But that turned out not to be true, because the book did very well out there. 

I think it is much more of a cultural thing for the British to laugh at themselves. It is seen as very bad form to boast. If you meet your girlfriends you do not say, ‘Oh, look at me! I am so tall and thin and beautiful. What a wonderful day I had. My career’s going great.’ You say, ‘Oh my god! You won’t believe what I’ve just done.’ And that’s the general tone. But I do think that once you crack the shell of anybody, there’s the same sort of tender creature inside. And so I think it is just not a cultural norm in America to knock themselves quite as much, but they enjoy hugely when people do.

STOLE THE PLOT FROM JANE AUSTEN!

I thought it was very well market-researched over a number of centuries and she probably wouldn’t mind anyway because she was dead (laughs). 

You know although Bridget seems quite silly, she is actually a very moral person. So she never blames anyone else, except herself. She is not bitter and she is quite strict about doing the right thing and being good to people and having integrity. So I based a lot of her on Elizabeth Bennet (from Pride and Prejudice). She has got a certain amount of dignity in a funny sort of way, which you don’t expect from her. 

Bridget won’t let herself in the end get pushed around by a Daniel Cleaver, and she won’t take an insulting invitation for a date from Mark Darcy, anymore than Elizabeth would from Mr Darcy. And I must say I get very confused between Mark Darcy, Mr Darcy and Colin Firth and in my mind they’ve all become exactly the same person! (Laughs)

IF I’M WRITING A BRIDGET MOVIE, I’LL WRITE IT FOR RENÉE

I think when I am writing a Bridget novel, I am seeing the world, not her. I could never cast the role (of Bridget), because for me I write it through the eyes of Bridget, so I never actually saw Bridget. The only person I saw was the original picture of her, which was on the cover of the first book, and that was just a secretary at The Independent, and it was just a little dark and mysterious. So when Renée took the part, it took me a while to get used to it. 

All three of the actors (Renée Zellweger as Bridget, Colin Firth as Mark Darcy, and Hugh Grant as Daniel Cleaver) are great fun. Hugh Grant, in particular, is very funny and a lot of lines in the first movie, like that scene where Bridget is wearing the giant mummy pants and he says, ‘Oh don’t worry, I’m wearing something rather similar myself, oh mummy!’... that was one of Hugh’s adlibs. 

I DIDN’T KILL COLIN FIRTH!

You do realise that! Well, when the book came out somebody actually came running out of a pub near where I live in London and said, ‘You’ve murdered Colin Firth!’ (Laughs) The thing is it is hard to write Bridget as a Smug Married and Mr Darcy-Mark Darcy-Colin Firth are quintessential gentlemen who would never leave Bridget alone with two children, so that was the only way. Plus, it is not a cynical exercise, it’s a story and that’s what happened in the story that I wrote.

Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) 

Written in the diary format, the first book in the series chronicles the life of 30-something Bridget Jones as she navigates career, friends, parents, dieting, self-help books, love and the lack of love. It became an instant hit as scores of women – we included – saw themselves in Bridget, as she struggled to be taken seriously at work, lose weight and flirt with Daniel Cleaver, only to find love in the unexpected Mark Darcy.

Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (1999)

Bridget is in a relationship with the man of her dreams, but it isn’t like she thought it would be. With advice from self-help books, and friends Jude and Shazzer, she struggles to deal with her not-so-sparkly love life, her mother and a giant hole in her flat. She sets off on a spiritual journey in Thailand and ends up in prison.

Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy (2013)

This one picks up from where The Edge of Reason left off 14 years ago. Mark Darcy is dead and Bridget is a single mom of two. Our favourite singleton is now busy juggling motherhood, texting, tweeting, and rediscovering her sexuality.

Bridget Jones’s Baby: The Diaries (2016)

Timeline-wise, this one is actually between the second and third books. It’s about Bridget before marriage and before babies, with her biological clock ticking as she finds herself pregnant under unusual circumstances. The quest? Finding out who the father is – Mark Darcy or Daniel Cleaver?

During the 14 years between the second and third Bridget books, Helen Fielding wrote a thriller – Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination, in 2004 – about a journalist who stumbles on a conspiracy and ends up as an MI6 agent! “Helen Fielding has swapped her literary model and lowered her game,” wrote The Guardian in its review of the book, which not many even know about.