All Things Considered (NPR)

With Daniel Zwerdling, Washington, DC - July 18, 1998 – Transcript.

HELEN FIELDING, AUTHOR, "BRIDGET JONES'S DIARY": Wednesday, August 2nd, 124 pounds, thigh circumference 18 inches, alcohol units three, a very pure sort of wine. Cigarettes seven, but did not inhale.

DANIEL ZWERDLING, HOST: And so reads the diary of Bridget Jones, British, single, thirty-something, a modern woman who obsesses about every vice she commits, and then records them.

FIELDING: Calories, 1500. Excellent! Teas, zero. Coffees, three, but made with real coffee beans, therefore less cellulite-inducing. Total caffeine units, four. Everything's fine. I'm going to get down to 119 pounds again, and free thighs entirely of cellulite.

ZWERDLING: Actually, not one word of this diary is true. But it's making its author extremely wealthy. Bridget Jones is the pen name of Helen Fielding, an English journalist and novelist who never made much of a splash until she began writing her Ersatz diary as a regular column in a British newspaper. Now, it's a best-selling book, Hollywood's turning it into a movie, and when Helen Fielding joined us the other day from our studio in Los Angeles, she told us that it's transforming her into a rather unlikely heroine to millions of thirty-something British women.

FIELDING: I find there are lots of girls, especially in London, who will come up to me at parties and jaunt and say, "I’m Bridget Jones, tell me I'm her," and I don't really quite know what to say. You know, it's like I'm the Pope or something. (LAUGHTER) If you're not Bridget, you're at the very least quite drunk. But also, you know, the book's come out in 22 countries now, and I'm astonished by the range of women who seem to find something in this character to identify with. It's something I've never imagined, because I started writing it quite unselfconsciously as a sort of money-spinner and to make it a laugh.

ZWERDLING: Why do you think that so many women come up to you and want you to bless them like you were the Pope or something? What do they get from having you, the author, say, "Yes, you're like Bridget."

FIELDING: I don't know. You see, I'd have thought they would want... (LAUGHTER) ... would not want to claim to smoke with a time and be frequently drunk, but I think what it is is that Bridget, like a lot of women, is besieged by notions of how she should be. She thinks she should be very thin. She thinks she should be very feminist. She thinks she should be very independent. She should be very fit. She should be able to cook. She should be free, and yet have a marvelous husband, and two children, and maybe also be a Buddhist. And she's struggling with all these images of perfection, and just kind of paralyzed between them all, and there's this huge gap between what she really feels and what she's really like, and what she ought to be thinking.

ZWERDLING: So when the women come up to you and say, "Please tell me I'm just like Bridget Jones," maybe they're saying, "Please tell me that I am not succeeding at everything I'm trying to be, but it's OK."

FIELDING: Exactly. I think that's it. In fact, someone said to me it's sort of - instead of feeling really bad about all your imperfection, then you can laugh at them.

ZWERDLING: It's quite amazing. The terms you use in your diary have become national catchwords in Britain, right?

FIELDING: Yes.

ZWERDLING: Now give us a few of the most common examples, and this is not a time to be modest. (LAUGHTER) What will we have of the saying...

FIELDING: There's the expression, "very Bridget Jones," seems to have entered the vocabulary. I keep seeing it in newspapers and hear people saying it.

ZWERDLING: So people say, "Oh, that's very Bridget Jones"?

FIELDING: Yes.

ZWERDLING: What do they mean?

FIELDING: I like your English accent.

ZWERDLING: Thank you.

FIELDING: They mean - I think they mean a certain kind of over-optimistic behavior, always intending to get things right and be better, unfailing, and also quite heavily stick-and-cheerful. And Bridget's very good at enjoying herself. It's also used to describe a certain type of singleton, a single woman who is...

ZWERDLING: Singleton?

FIELDING: Yes. A single woman who is attractive, who's single, who lives a bit like a bachelor used to, with a sort of messy apartment, goes out and drinks with her friends, has lots of fun, talks about dating a lot, but also has a job and is, you know, very independent. "Spinster" is a rotten word to describe a single woman. It's got all these connotations of shawls and spinning wheels and sell-by dates and the sense that there's been some ghastly mistake, somewhere along the line. We are tortured by smug marrieds at parties who insist on us...

ZWERDLING: Wait, wait, wait! "Smug marrieds," that's another one of your terms?

FIELDING: "Smug marrieds," yes. Smug marrieds are the people who are married, and have somehow formed the idea that this is the only possible way to live, and anyone who isn't living like that has made a horrible mistake and is a failure and a reject. And they tend to torture the singletons by constantly going up to them and saying, "Why aren't you married?" and "How's your love life going?", and they're questions which Bridget finds very rude, and she always wants to go up to them and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still having sex?"

"Saturday, February 25th. 122 pounds, miracle. Sex proved to be indeed the best form of exercise. Alcohol units, zero. Cigarettes, zero. Calories, 200. At last I've found the secret of not eating, simply replace food with sex.

"Six P.M. Oh joy! I spent the day in a state I can only describe as shagged drunkenness, mooning about the flat, smiling, picking things up and putting them down again. It was so lovely! The only down points were, one, immediately after it was over, Daniel said, "Damn! I meant to take the car into the Citron garage," and two, when I got up to go to the bathroom, he pointed out the fact that I had a pair of tights stuck to the back of my calf. But, as the racy crowds begin to disperse, I begin to feel alarm. What now? No plans were made. Suddenly I realize I'm waiting for the phone, again. How can it be that the situation between the sexes after a first night remain so agonizingly unbalanced? Feel as if I have just sat an exam and must wait for my results."

ZWERDLING: Well, I have a question for you. Now that you've been in the United States, have you thought of a term for all those people in the health clubs and on the spas who stand in front of the mirrors and preen themselves and look at themselves as they're flexing their muscles?

FIELDING: Do you know, that's a very good idea. I'm going to work on a term for that, because they are dreadful. There's some women who peer into the chamber and make mobile phone calls, and they're naked. It's just... (LAUGHTER)

ZWERDLING: I must admit, mobile phone calls when they're naked, hmm!

FIELDING: Yes, this is wrong.

ZWERDLING: Are you sort of shocked, frankly, that you know these diaries have been such an unbelievable success? You know, people are reading so much meaning into them, and you said originally you wrote this for a money-spin. You mean, you actually wrote this because you wanted to make money?

FIELDING: Kind of, yes. I mean, I wanted...

ZWERDLING: That's such a brash admission by an author!

FIELDING: It is simply, but I was writing this quite complicated thing that was causing me a lot of trouble, and so I started to write Bridget in a very unselfconscious way. I just thought it would be light and would make people laugh. But it would help me through, you know, I was really broke, and it would help me to write my other thing. It is much easier to write than many other things I've written, including earnest articles about whither the Industrial North of England or whatever, and I think there's a lesson to be learned from that.

ZWERDLING: But do you - I mean, since you have written, you know, very serious articles in the past, like "Whither the Industrial North?", do you feel sort of - I don't know what the word is - embarrassed, sheepish almost that you are getting rich - let's be honest about it - you are getting rich now from writing, you know, what in comparison is sort of a just fluffy, funny, you know, fun work?

FIELDING: Well, it is - it is quite ironic, in a way, to try so hard in little errors. I mean, my first book was this - was a satire about Africa, never did port that one, and then this one, I never expected to be anything, and look what happened.

ZWERDLING: Helen Fielding, a.k.a. Bridget Jones, author of "Bridget Jones's Diary," thanks a lot.

FIELDING: Thank you.

ZWERDLING: And I'm curious. Just sort of - I always wondered this about authors and I know everybody has a different way of dealing this, but how do you do, like, you know, 50 interviews a day and not go completely stark raving mad?

FIELDING: I did think I'd turned into a zombie parrot when I was doing the tour. And the trouble is you start to feel as if you're lying because you've told the truth so many times. It seems like you've made it up because you've said it so many times.

ZWERDLING: And for this evening, that's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.


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