Helen Fielding: ‘I’m very protective of Bridget Jones’

It’s almost impossible to capture what Bridget Jones’s Diary (46 on The Sunday Times Top 100 bestsellers list) meant to women when it was published in 1996, followed three years later by Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (77). So instead let’s look at what it means to women today.
Last year The New York Times published a thundering feature denouncing the books: “Bridget Jones deserved better. We all did” was the headline. The journalist bemoaned Bridget’s obsession with having a boyfriend and her anxiety about her weight. “It might have been depressingly funny 25 years ago; now it’s just depressing,” she said.
Helen Fielding, the author of the Bridget books, finds these discussions about the morality or otherwise of her creation v v amusing, as Bridget would say. “I’m so used to the cycle by now: someone says she’s good or she’s bad, and then it goes on breakfast TV. Honestly, I just take it as quite a compliment,” she tells me from her (lovely) home in north London.
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She’s right to do so. There have been plenty of zeitgeisty blockbuster books, but they tend to disappear as quickly as a packet of Silk Cut in Bridget’s flat. No one debates the ethics of, say, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Yet Bridget Jones — who would now be deep into her fifties (gah!) — is still a part of the cultural lexicon, whether it’s women like me who read her in the 1990s using terms like “smug marrieds” and “emotional f***wit”, or slightly younger women professing horror at Bridget’s obsessive calorie counting. And there’s a simple reason for that: as much as her critics may like to pretend otherwise, Fielding touched on something timeless and true. But because the books are so funny, the humourless miss the point.
“The jokes in Bridget come from something quite painful, which was her perception that she was in her thirties and she’d somehow made a mistake by not getting married yet and there’s this ticking clock. But also there were good reasons why she was still single,” Fielding says. “Neurotic isn’t cute,” tutted the New York Times article. But as Fielding says: “It’s a mark of strength to laugh at your imperfections, not weakness, and laughter is quite an intelligent way to process the world.”
Bridget was born when The Independent commissioned Fielding, then a freelance journalist, to write a column about her life as a single woman in her thirties. “But that felt too exposing, so I decided to write an exaggerated comic version,” she says. As it happens, Bridget’s American contemporary, Carrie Bradshaw, emerged the same way, with Candace Bushnell writing a semi-fictionalised version of her life for The New York Observer in a column called (you may have guessed this part) Sex and the City.
“I think fiction can be a bit slow to catch up with what’s going on, and with a newspaper Candace Bushnell and I could write about what was happening and it’s out there straight away.”
Fielding’s friends — including the journalist Tracey MacLeod and the director Sharon Maguire, the inspirations for Bridget’s best friends Jude and Shazza — quickly guessed that she wrote the columns because she used so much of her biography in them. The famous scene in which Bridget accidentally serves her friends blue soup at a dinner party came straight from Fielding’s life. “Yes, I got a book by Marco Pierre White, and it said, ‘Tie the leeks with string,’ and I only had blue string, and I thought, ‘Oh, it’ll be fine…’” she laughs, still delightedly mocking herself.
Fielding “expected nothing” of the column. “It wasn’t supposed to be social commentary, just a peek into what was going on in a woman’s head in her thirties in the 1990s, and I was sure it would be cancelled after six weeks.” But readers loved it and Fielding’s book editor, Georgia Garrett, convinced her to bin the “unreadable” novel she was working on about cultural divides in the Caribbean (“I enjoyed the research, at least”) and turn Bridget into a book.
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“It was so weird, watching the book climb up the bestseller charts: 3, then 2, then 1, and then it stayed at 1. I cut out all the charts and stuck them on the inside of a box so I could look at them, but if someone came round I could slam the box shut so it didn’t look like I was being boastful,” she says.
Three years later the publication of The Edge of Reason caused overnight queues at bookshops. Then the first film came out in 2001 (directed by Maguire, aka Shazza) and a global franchise was born. Fielding was living in Los Angeles by then with Kevin Curran, a writer on The Simpsons, and they had two children. He died in 2016 after a long illness.
Fielding is now back in London, and the latest film, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, is being filmed not far from her house. “It’s such a huge machine now and I’m only one voice of many. I just hope that the heart of it comes through,” she says. Has she popped down to the set? “Once or twice. I’m really fond of Renée [Zellweger, who plays Bridget] and all the actors. It’s lovely seeing them together again, but I’m not hugely involved.”
So many of the elements that we now think of as inextricable to Bridget emerged “entirely unself-consciously,” she says. Bridget’s distinctive truncated way of writing (“Cannot face going into work”, “V v v bad day”) came about because at the time there were so many first-person columns knocking around in the newspapers that Private Eye ran a tally counting how many times columnists used the first-person pronoun, “to show how self-obsessed they were,” Fielding says. “So I decided I would never use personal pronouns and that’s how that style developed.”
Modelling Bridget’s love interest on Mr Darcy, and then making the whole plot of Bridget Jones’s Diary a homage to Pride and Prejudice came about because the Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle BBC Pride and Prejudice was on TV at the time and Fielding was “obsessed, like everyone”.
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason nods at another Jane Austen novel, Persuasion. “A book has to have a good plot and those plots really do make you turn the pages. Plus, you know, Austen’s dead, so I thought she wouldn’t mind.”
There were rumours that Mark — the hotshot human rights lawyer — was modelled on the 1990s hotshot human rights lawyer Keir Starmer. “I can neither confirm nor deny that,” Fielding says, smiling. “But there was a profile of Starmer in The Sunday Times Magazine recently, and there was a photo of him in his wig and he actually did look quite like Mark Darcy.”
I tell her I’ve met at least five journalists who worked with Fielding in the 1990s, and all claim they were inspiration for the sexy emotional f***wit Daniel Cleaver. This delights her: “Put it this way. I discovered that if you want to put a real person in the book, it’s fine as long as you make them really attractive.”
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Today’s critics of the book seem to think that no one back in the Dark Ages of the 1990s noticed that Bridget was a weight-obsessed lunatic. But people were debating whether she was a good or bad example to women from the book’s earliest days. Strange how no one argues whether, say, Bertie Wooster is an unfair depiction of men, with all his drinking and stupidity. “Tchuh,” as Bridget would say.
Does Fielding think Bridget’s obsession with her weight dates her? “No, because I live with a teenage girl,” she says, referring to her 18-year-old daughter (she also has a 20-year-old son). “And I know that body shaming is still bad, plus the girls have this extra layer about feeling guilty about being obsessed with how they look.” And while people may no longer count calories, they count plenty of other things: steps, carbs, hours of fasting. Bridget is not as unrelatable as some people like to pretend.
Fielding is working on another novel. “Not a Bridget one, but there’s always a chance it could turn into one. But I’m very protective of Bridget, so any book about her has to have integrity and emotional honesty.”
Does she think she will write Bridget books for each stage of her life? “I don’t know. I still have this thing that one day I’ll be a serious literary novelist or political journalist,” she says, and laughs at herself again.