List-Making
with Bridget
By
Sarah Seltzer | The Reading Life - December 3, 2013
Once I purchased a miniature notepad whose cover is embossed with the words
“A List of Things I Will Eventually Do In Specific Order.” It’s a
hip-looking organizational tool, yet I have filled only the first page.
Still, despite repeat evidence that I’m not stellar at following
through on list-making, in my mind I continue scrawling on those brown
post-consumer sheets of paper. Metaphorically, I have covered them with
vows of self-discipline, all composed in the prose style of pioneering
chick-lit protagonist Bridget Jones. For three books and counting (the
most recent, Mad About the Boy appeared this fall), Bridget has
dished to her diary about her grand life makeover plans without relying
on first person pronouns.
I’m perhaps not the most recognizable counterpart to Bridget. I’m
bookish and at least make an attempt to be countercultural, while she
has a broad British ladette persona, deliberately relatable. I read big
nineteenth century novels for fun; Bridget’s life story is inspired by
several (Tom Jones and the novels of Jane Austen) but her
entry into literary life peaked when she asked Salman Rushdie where the
loo was at a cocktail party. One of the more amusing moments of the new
novel occurs when Bridget, during a pitch session for her
screenplay-update of Hedda Gabler, is revealed to have persistently
misspelled the Ibsen heroine’s name. And actually, this mistake
doesn’t even distinguish me from Bridget. I’ve re-read Pride and Prejudice upwards of six times and I
still sometimes forget whether the Bennet family has two “Ts” at the
end of their name. (Let me just Google that. Just as I thought.)
Truthfully that’s why I have found Miss Jones to be a kindred spirit
– we share a good many flaws. These would include our inattention to
detail, our big mouths, and our tendency to open them and insert our
feet inside, not to mention fill them with grated cheese straight from
the bag. We are ebullient types, me and Bridge – we color outside the
lines, blurt things out, knock vases over, and remain superficially
convinced that if we just tried harder, we could transcend all that, and
become like those coiffed and manicured mommies, the ones who never have
a hair out of place. In Mad About
the Boy, the embodiment of this ideal is named
Nicolette, and Bridget never fails to accidentally call her Nicorette.
Throughout Mad About the Boy, Bridget’s self-upgrade
wishlist primarily includes: buying new outfits that render their wearer
a facsimile of a collected celebrity facing down Paps on the tarmac;
reacting coolly to provocation from fellow pre-school moms whose
offspring are dubbed Eros and Cosmata; laying off the wine and cheese;
mastering home electronics; and learning how to flirt digitally,
without sending desperate online signals – particularly to the titular
boy, a twenty-something May to her December, a love interest first
encountered in that brave new world: Twitter.
Mad About the Boy caused a ripple when it was revealed that author
Helen Fielding had offed Bridget’s crowd-pleasing husband, Mark Darcy,
in order to once again put her heroine’s back up against the wall –
and her face on various online dating sites. I was sorry to see
Darcy’s demise, but I remained much more interested in watching
Bridget battle her own demons, to whose number we can now include
“excessive drunk-tweeting leading to loss of hard-won followers.”
One of Fielding’s humblest yet most universal tropes has always been
this: however bad things are for you, they’re worse for someone else
(Nicolette’s circumstances, be assured, are not as enviable as they
seem). Later in the novel, stuck up a tree chasing her kids, Bridget
literally shows her ass (in a thong, one of the small ways Bridget and
Fielding are stuck in the 90s). And yet because this is a chick-lit
novel, and because Fielding is a humanist, this moment of extreme
humiliation nets her the attention of an age-appropriate suitor battling
back his own trauma. While she will never be a Zen goddess, nor will her
new outfit look sensible, what both he and we see is not just a thong,
but also Bridget Jones, survivor, coping with immeasurable loss, and
managing to have regular snuggles with her children. Bridget as a
character feels like more of a revelation in middle age, with true
sorrow lurking around the edges of her capers and scrapes, than she ever
was as a “singleton.”
So while the dialectic between Bridget’s constant self-improvement
lists, the superego of her diary, and the id-ridden reality of her life
has stayed the same, she has progressed. She may binge and spill, yet in
Darcy’s absence she has become her family bulwark. Her scrawled
declarations that she “must purchase outfit with skinny jeans” and
“must stop eating grated cheese out of the bag” serve not merely as
zany specimens of life as a hot mess, but also as commentary on ways we
try to stay afloat. And as I get older I realize that staying afloat is
quite a feat, not a bare minimum.
As for me, my most intrinsic bad habits have settled in. I have a sharp
tongue and proclivities towards secret-spilling, messiness,
overindulgence and melodramatic reactions to the curveballs life throws.
And yet compared the girlish me who read the first Bridget Jones during
the summer before college, I am a Zen goddess of sorts, because those
bad habits accompany a much more complex, difficult, and consequently
joyful existence. I pay the rent! I make it to work! I share the
household with another person to whom I am legally and socially bound.
Life has deepened and become strewn with impediments, an obstacle
course. Thank goodness my bad habits provide some consistency.
If I could transcribe my own mental Bridget Jones’ imitation, it would
resemble the following:
-
Will wake up when first alarm goes off, and like zen goddess, write for half
an hour to tap into subconscious, then do sun salutations.
-
Will brush all layers of hair, not just the top one.
-
Will refrain from subtweeting in manner that makes target of said tweets
obvious. Furthermore, when husband correctly guesses target, will
not feign innocence and declare Tweet to be a “sort of general
statement about life!”
-
Will not hover around office Munchkin box engaging in ritualistic
declaration of “I really shouldn’t, oh no, I’m so bad!” as
Munchkins successively slide down gullet.
-
Will read edifying novel during downtime instead of lying under blanket on
couch, gliding thumb listlessly over smartphone screen, wondering if
“anything is happening on the Internet.”
-
When friends reject invitation to hang out because “too busy,” will not
respond with link to viral 2012 New York Times, op-ed, “The Busy Trap”: “Busyness serves as a kind of existential
reassurance, a hedge against emptiness.”
-
Will not schedule every hour of week in attempt at existential reassurance,
a hedge against emptiness.
-
Will check to make sure phone is NOT in speak-out-loud “drive” mode
before important meetings.
-
After having two drinks on empty stomach at happy hour, will not approach
communal chips/dip in manner of desperate mother re-encountering
small child lost at the zoo.
-
Will be mindful of spaces between seats on trains, in concerts, and in
conference rooms, and thereby avoid injuring bystanders in said
spaces with accidental hip thrusts and errant swinging of purse.
None of us ever tick all the
items off our self-improvement lists. We don’t change, except
for the fact that we do. We learn to look after of ourselves, and then
to love and care for others, and maybe even to live without them in the
worst circumstances. Our evolution, our most profound alteration, slips
in undetected while we’re preoccupied with modifying our diets, trying
to make early morning exercise class, revamping our wardrobes and
failing, always failing, to modify our drunk-Tweeting habits.
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