Q&A with Bridget Jones author, Helen Fielding

Helen Fielding | Random House Books, New Zealand – 23 October 2013

The last Bridget Jones book The Edge of Reason was published in 1999. Why have you made us wait so long for the next installment? We’ve missed Bridget!

It is a while since I last wrote a Bridget book. Bridget is a character who I’m really fond of and she means a lot to me. It was a choice between either keeping on doing the same thing – or waiting until I had something different to say. And that’s what I did. It came to me quite organically this book; I wasn’t expecting to write it. I have the note in my diary from March 2012, ‘I wonder if I could write a book about…’ It wasn’t initially about Bridget. And then the voice became Bridget’s voice. What was nice about writing it was that, as with the first book, nobody was the slightest bit interested in it because I hadn’t told anybody about it. I could write on my laptop, in my usual armchair, without wondering what anyone else would think about it. It freed me up to say what I wanted to say and tell the story I wanted to tell.

What’s changed in Bridget’s life over the past decade?

Bridget is quite a lot older now – so things are very different, both in her life, and in our lives. The world has completely changed since I wrote the first book. Then, there was no texting and there were no emails. Bridget had a primitive form of messaging in the office with Daniel Cleaver (‘Have you forgotten to put on your skirt?’), but that was it. Some of the things I found particularly funny and intriguing while I was writing the new book were to do with technology. Bridget now lives her life through texting. She has her own set of rules about it – the number one rule being ‘do not text when drunk’. I was interested in exploring little things like that, which I suppose I was struggling with, that I thought others might be struggling with. Like the cyber circle? Where you log on to answer an email and then you suddenly see a story on Yahoo, and then you google some holidays, and then you look at boys on a dating site, and then kettles at John Lewis, and then go and look at dresses. And then you get sad because you put a dress in your basket and it didn’t wink back at you. And then, hours have gone by and you realize you didn’t answer the email you logged on to reply to in the first place.

Another thing I find curious about the modern world is how everyone is just too busy. It’s almost as if people’s brains have too many computer pages open. There’s all this communication from texting and emails and Twitter and WhatsApp and Instagram – and just so many different things going on at once. People have got really overstuffed lives. Bridget of course deals with it by reading one of her self-help books, which tells her to divide the day up into four quadrants of jobs: important and urgent; important not urgent; not important and urgent; not important and not urgent. So she gets all her mad jobs – respond to zombie apocalypse invitation; find phone; lose 10 lbs; respond to Cosmata’s Build a Bear Party invitation; blow up bike – and then puts them into the quadrants. I think a lot of people are battling with the same thing, we’re all just too busy.

Does Daniel Cleaver make an appearance? Where is he at in his life?

Well I love Daniel as character. And I obviously love Hugh’s take on him. I think Hugh contributed a lot to the funny lines in the movies. For example the part where Daniel’s seducing Bridget and she’s wearing the big pants – and he says ‘Oh don’t worry I’m wearing something rather similar myself, Oh Mummy’ – that came from him. I really wanted to keep him present, and in the new book he’s godfather to Bridget’s children. He’s not the ideal godfather. There’s one scene where Billy and Mabel stay the night with Daniel, and when Bridget picks them up from school Mabel’s hair is in a complex chignon. She thinks that Daniel has had someone come in especially to do her hair. But in fact Mabel tells Bridget that Daniel brushed her hair with a fork because he didn’t have a hairbrush! So he’s a little patchy and sometimes the babysitting goes a bit wild! He’s very much still Daniel, asking what colour are your panties, having a crack at seduction whenever it presents itself, but he’s still in Bridget’s life and they accept each other as they are. I think people do stay in peoples’ lives; old boyfriends do become friends.

On the front cover of the new book Mad About The Boy, there are toys by Bridget’s high heels. Can we assume she has a little toddler in tow?

Well Bridget is now a mother and parenthood becomes another of those things that she thinks she’s meant to be really good at, but that she thinks she’s really crap at. So she reads a lot of parenting books including ‘1, 2, 3 Happy Parenting’ and ‘French Children Don’t Throw Food’. All that happens with the latter is that she keeps shouting ‘Attends!’ at the children and they ignore her. And with the ‘1,2,3’ book she keeps saying ‘Come to the table, come to the table, 1, 2…’ and not knowing what she’s going to say when she gets to 3. It’s a terrible muddle! She does sometimes forget them and leave them on the pavement and she does sometimes worry that they’ll be taken into care by the social services – but essentially she loves them. One of the sweetest moments in the book is when Bridget’s had Botox and it’s gone wrong and the children ask why has her face ‘gone all funny’ – and she’s also just set the spaghetti on fire, but then they all end up toasting marshmallows on the fire and they all cuddle and they all love each other. A difficulty with modern parenting is that women often have children later, once they’ve enjoyed a career. Women can control things in their career, but you can’t control children! It’s almost as if the bar’s set too high and there’s this carousel of going from parties to playdates to computer games to fencing lessons – whereas in fact I think Bridget gives a sense that it’s not really about that. It’s about being with them and loving them and muddling through like everything else.

What can you tell us about The Boy?

Aha, the boy! Well the reason I chose that title is I love that Cole Porter song. There was an advert in the 80s with the Dina Washington’s ‘Mad about the Boy’ –I think it was for shrink fit Levis? It was set in suburbia and there was a boy who dived through all these swimming pools and then ripped off his t-shirt… and so that was the idea for the title. It’s quite tongue in cheek, a little bit camp really! In the book Bridget does have a younger man who she meets on Twitter and this toy boy says to Bridget he does not like the word ‘cougar’ because it’s sort of insulting and it implies a huntress rather than the hunted. In the first Bridget Jones book, I think single women were still struggling with the idea that they were tragic barren spinsters who’d been left on the shelf and were going to be eaten by an Alsatian. This wasn’t actually what was going on; they were girls who’d got their own jobs or didn’t want to settle and then came the word singleton. (I thought I made up the word singleton and boasted about it but discovered, to my embarrassment, that it was actually P G Wodehouse who came up with it.) I think in the same way that the first book was looking at the way thirty-something girls were branded with an outdated idea, this book is looking at how older women are branded with phrases like ‘of a certain age’ – which are actually rather patronizing and insulting. There is a sense that women who get to their forties or fifties are past it– but that’s not what I see and I think it’s time we looked at the subject a bit differently.

How has Bridget embraced social media?

Well one of Bridget’s resolutions is that she’s going to get on Twitter, Instgram and Whatsapp so she doesn’t feel out of it and old. She treats Twitter how she previously treated calories, ‘number of followers: 0’. She joins because she thinks its going to connect her with others in the evening, but she ends up feeling unpopular and that others are tweeting about how unpopular she is. I’m really interested by Twitter, I joined myself and got so obsessed with it that I couldn’t live my life without tweeting and over tweeting, and Bridget also has trouble with all of that. She feels that Twitter is a bit like the days of Robin Hood: there are bands of merry men – or not so merry men – slagging each other off and having their own band of followers. I think it’s quite interesting how human interaction finds its way – you don’t have gangs of men running around in forests anymore, but you have little gangs on Twitter. Bridget herself doesn’t really have a gang but she does eventually get some followers!

How has Bridget coped with ageing? Is she still as adorably neurotic as before?

Bridget is constantly resolving to change, but I don’t think anyone really changes. She still has the sense of wild optimism, followed by despair – so one minute she thinks ‘I’m marvellous, I’m a sex goddess’ and the next she sees a poster for an over fifties trip to Hastings! But she’s always got her friends and they make her laugh – they all have a motto ‘KBO’ which means keep buggering on.

The first book was published in 40 countries, has sold more than 15 million copies worldwide and both films proved to be huge blockbusters. What do you think it is about Bridget that has such worldwide appeal?

I never expected anything of Bridget – I started writing it anonymously as a column in the Independent and thought they would stop it after six weeks for being too silly. So it was a wonderful thing to happen to a freelance journalist and I didn’t understand why it had happened. I think the moment I did was when I was in Japan, on a book tour, and this really glamorous, thin and successful TV presenter told me that she identified with Bridget because she too felt too fat and not good enough. I think the appeal is that it deals with the gap between how people are expected to be and how they actually are. Women particularly are inundated with all of these airbrushed images of perfection and so you think that’s what you’re mean to be. What I am most proud of about Bridget is that she makes you feel that it’s alright to be human.

Tell us a secret about Bridget that no one knows!

Well, Bridget doesn’t exist, so I can’t really think of a secret about her because she’s a fictional character! But one important thing about her is that she isn’t alone because she lets in people that humour her. Bridget’s mother is always saying ‘don’t wallow in it’ and there’s patch where she wallows too much. She gets a bit carried away and goes into a spiral about how hard her life is and starts writing ‘I am alone but I am brave’ and then her phone goes and someone’s lurching through the door, and her mum’s there and her kids are there. She’s not alone. Like all of us she gets histrionic about her own problems and then people come round and sort of laugh at her.