Helen
Fielding is Mad about the Girl
Allen Pierleoni | Sacramento Bee - December 15, 2013
Bridget
Jones is back after a 14-year absence, somewhat bruised but as
optimistic and chatty as ever.
British
author Helen Fielding introduced Bridget in 1996 in the
international best-seller “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” and overnight
became the godmother of the chick-lit subgenre. Bridget was lovable but
ditzy, a 30-something single professional obsessed with losing weight,
giving up smoking and looking for love in all the wrong places, which at
the time was a fresh template in pop fiction. Bridget loves to tell all,
recording her misadventures in an open, stream-of-consciousness style in
her diary. The 2001 film
adaptation starred
Renée Zellweger as Bridget and Colin Firth as Mark Darcy,
Bridget’s soul mate.
At
the end of the plot-crazy 1999 sequel, “The Edge of Reason,” it
looks like Bridget and Mark are bound for the marriage altar at last.
The 2004 movie once again starred Zellweger and Firth.
Now, in the new “Mad About the Boy” (Knopf, $26.95, 400 pages), we
meet Bridget 2.0. She’s 51 and the widowed mother of two young
children. Five years earlier, husband Mark Darcy was killed while on an
assignment in Darfur. The older Bridget has moved into the digital age,
using social media to flirt with men 20 years her junior and again to
share her life’s journey with her friends and her digital diary.
“Basically, Bridget likes being naughty,” said Fielding, 55. But her
goal remains the same: Find Mr. Right – again.
These days, Fielding lives in London and continues to work on the stage
musical of “Diary.” “We’ve done lots of workshops, and they’re
good fun, but to get everybody together at the same place and same time
is a lot,” she said.
I caught up with her by phone from the Clift Hotel in San Francisco.
Your fans are thrilled to see Bridget again.
I find it touching that people still want to read about her. (When the
book was released) they were so upset about (the death of Bridget’s
husband) that it was in all the newspapers and on the 10 o’clock news
in England. First the Syria crisis, then Mark Darcy is dead.
Like the new Bridget, you’re a working writer in your 50s and the
mother of two with an absent husband (the couple is separated).
When I first started writing Bridget, I was horrified that people
connected me to the character. I’m very private, and then I made up
this very exaggerated comic character. Of course, everyone thought it
was me, so it was magnified a million times.
Now I’m a bit more relaxed. The diary form is so emotionally honest
I’d find it hard to write about something that was a long way from my
own circumstances. Sadly, given the amount of excitement Bridget has in
this book, it’s not a memoir. Like “Diary,” it’s mostly a
hodgepodge of stories people have told me, things I’ve seen around me,
and things that could happen or almost happened to me. The comedy comes
from the emotional truth at the bottom of it.
You’ve said “Mad About the Boy” didn’t start out as a Bridget
novel.
Right, it was going to be about a woman who finds herself on the dating
scene after the whole landscape has changed and is having to rediscover
herself as a woman later in life. She turned into Bridget, who has to
learn how to get back into the dating scene. She still loves self-help
books, so she studies dating books (listed) on amazon.com and tries to
distill that world into a new set of dating rules. Her No. 1 new dating
rule is, “Do not text when drunk.”
Has Bridget evolved?
She still has the same insecurities and still senses there’s a big gap
between how she’s supposed to be and how she actually is. But now
there’s more things to apply it to, like how many Twitter followers
she has vs. how many she thinks she’s supposed to have.
Feminists criticized the Bridget character when she debuted. Any heat
over “Mad About the Boy”?
Feminism is about being equal, and we haven’t gotten very far if
we’re afraid to laugh at ourselves. I tell Bridget’s age for the
first time, just because of the shock it would cause: “How dare a
woman of that age behave like this!” Bridget is not the secretary of
state for women, she’s just a comic character. But I am saying that
women do not just disappear as they get older. They are still sexual
beings, still full of fun and life.
Why does Bridget stir such passionate reactions from readers, pro and
con?
I don’t honestly know. Initially, I was really surprised because I
thought I was just writing nonsense. Maybe it has something to do with
the age we live in, where there is so much artifice. Bridget has a level
of emotional honesty that some people find unacceptable, and some find
funny and something they can identify with. She’s dealt with some
tough stuff, but still finds the joy in life.
“Diary” was a modernization of Jane Austen’s “Pride and
Prejudice.” What about “Mad About the Boy”?
I thought I’d grown up and made it my own this time, but it’s still
stuck to the Jane Austen marriage plot. What I’ve got again is a
buttoned-up romantic hero who needs the earthy, fun-loving joie de vivre
of a Bridget. These two people spend almost a whole book arguing over
children and parenting, and not recognizing each other.
Bridget’s love interest is Scott Wallaker, a teacher at her son’s
school. When he and Bridget get together, the pages of the book catch on
fire.
The funny thing about that scene was that Mr. Wallaker is the name of a
teacher at my own son’s school – Andrew Walliker. I used “Mr.
Wallaker” all the way through the book because it’s such a
good-sounding name, thinking I would change it… But when it came to
publication time, I couldn’t think of another name that worked so
well.
So I rang up Mr. Walliker himself and asked, “Can I use your name?”
He roared in laughter and said, “Of course.” I said, “But you’ve
got a sex scene with Bridget, what about all the boys at school?” He
laughed even more and said, “It will be hilarious.” Now he’s
become a minor celebrity in England. He’s been on the BBC and is doing
interviews.
Try this: There’s a knock on your hotel room door. You open it, and
there stands Bridget Jones. What do you do?
We go downstairs to the Redwood Room bar, what do you think? And we
leave our cell phones behind.
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