The Bridget Jones effect: how life has changed for the single woman
The fact that Bridget Jones became popular was unexpected to me, and everyone else involved. The moment I began to understand why was in Tokyo, in the strangeness of my first book tour. A strikingly glamorous, thin, beautiful, successful news presenter told me that she totally identified with feeling fat and not good enough. She seemed so perfect – and clearly only existed on little bits of fish. It's possible that something may have got lost in translation. (After all, a reviewer of the Italian translation of Bridget Jones's Diary described it as "a transcendental study of existential despair".) But I suspected that what Bridget had unwittingly tapped into was the gap between how people feel they are expected to be on the outside and how they actually feel inside.
I didn't start writing Bridget with any grand scheme or social themes in mind. She wasn't supposed to be the secretary of state for women, or anything. I was struggling with my second unreadable novel about cultural divides in the Caribbean and trying to get freelance articles accepted by various newspapers. The Independent asked me to write a column as myself, which was great, as I was broke. But, being quite a private person, I thought it would be hopelessly embarrassing and exposing. I agreed, instead, to make up a character and write the column anonymously.
I told no one at first, and assumed it would be nixed after six weeks for being too silly. The people sitting on the desk with me were writing about politics and Chechenyaaaaa. I was writing about how many more calories there were in an olive than a Malteser (it depends on the size and type of the olive). But interest grew. Letters began to arrive for the editor, one of them – rather formal – saying:
"Dear Sir,
I would quite like to shag Bridget Jones. Could you let me have her phone number please?"
Many thanks,
Yours faithfully …
My publishers decided Bridget Jones might be a better bet than the unreadable second novel, and then things slowly began to snowball and bestsellerdom, movies and book tours followed. Talk about being exposed! I spent years and years denying that Bridget had anything to do with me, quipping self-defensively: "I don't drink or smoke and I am a virgin."
A lot of books in a similar vein followed Bridget, mainly with pink covers, to the point where I was dubbed by Barbara Walters the "grandmother" of chick-lit. I assume she meant to say "godmother". But I don't think it was imitation: it was zeitgeist.
Back in the mid-1990s the way single women in their 30s were presented socially – and certainly in books and films – hadn't caught up with reality. The air of Miss Havisham and the tragic barren spinster left on the shelf was still hanging around us. The film Fatal Attraction presented the single 36-year-old as a desperate bunny boiler. Friends of one's parents would whisper: "Why aren't you married?" in tones of appalled dismay.
We weren't Miss Havisham or bunny boilers. We were products of a new generation, with our own flats, cars, incomes and expectations. We weren't single because – as Bridget joked – "underneath our clothes our entire bodies are covered in scales": we just didn't need to settle for someone who wasn't right, simply to keep life afloat.
I think it's still very hard for women in their 30s to figure out the career/dating/babies issues – no one has fixed the biological clock yet. And embarrassingly, after I'd boasted about it, it turned out it wasn't me who had coined the term "singleton", but PG Wodehouse. But at least, since Bridget, thirtysomething singletons are no longer saddled with Miss Havisham as a role model.
It went beyond the singleton issue, though. The thing about writing anonymously is that it frees you up to be honest. Details that I thought were just unique to me – such as seeing if you weighed less without your watch on, or having a very confused knowledge about what was going on in Chechenyaaaaa (and how to spell it) in spite of being a professional woman, or deciding you were going to end up dying alone and being eaten by a dog because somebody hadn't called – turned out to be the sort of thing that millions of other women identified with.
It was strange, yet reassuring. When I was doing the publicity, I still thought I was fat and saying the wrong thing, and somehow as if I was wearing wellingtons on the red carpet. But I knew I wasn't the only person infected with the idea that I should look like someone out of a magazine. I knew that what the fans of Bridget were really responding to, amid the inundation of images of perfection, was that it's actually alright to be human, just to sort of muddle along, try to do things right, be nice to your friends, and laugh about what goes wrong on the way.
There was a certain amount of indignation among anxious feminists. One of my favourite lines from the first book was "There is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism" – and I could see how this sort of thing would annoy you, if you weren't a fan of irony. But my feeling was, and is, if women aren't allowed to laugh at themselves, they haven't got very far on the equality front, have they?
I wrote the bulk of Mad About the Boy, the new Bridget book, in the same armchair in which I wrote the first one, and in much the same position, with the laptop on my knee. With the first book, I was unselfconscious because no one was particularly interested; with Mad About the Boy it was because I hadn't told anyone I was writing it. That was the only way I could write it, so I could be honest about what I felt was going on, without worrying what everyone would think. It happened quite organically. There were new things that were making me laugh in London and new things I wanted to write about: unexploded email box bombs, tweeting, Botox, over-stuffed lives, online dating, how to lose your born-again virginity, juggling work and parenthood, the way the image of (ugh) the "middle-aged" woman is as outdated and mean as the tragic barren spinster was when Bridget was first struggling with it.
I didn't intend it to be a Bridget book at first, but I started to realise I was writing in her voice. And just as a thirtysomething Bridget felt a huge gap between how she was expected to be and how she was, an older Bridget was finding that, with all the losses, sadnesses and wonderful surprises of life, there's a big gap between how you expect life to be and how it actually turns out.
People were wildly indignant at first that Bridget had grown older and things had changed. I was startled when watching the BBC news in my PJs, during reporting on the Syrian crisis I saw the headline "Mark Darcy is Dead!" But I was also very touched. How many writers create characters that people still care about after so long and feel such ownership of? I couldn't have just churned out a watered-down version of the same thing. The world changes, people have tough stuff to deal with in life. There are dark notes and light notes, we all get through by supporting each other and laughing when we can. That's how Bridget operates – like one of your friends. The jokes in Bridget Jones must have their roots in honesty and truth. And the fact that the book is, after 10 weeks, No 1 in the hardback fiction bestseller lists shows that when people actually read it, they understand and care about her still.
I never expected an anonymous column to turn out as it did, and it was a wonderful thing to happen to a freelance journalist. It's more wonderful still if Bridget has done something to counteract the culture of perfection and make people feel it's alright just to be alright. I wonder where the perfect Japanese news presenter is. I bet her life didn't turn out like she expected, any more than Bridget's – and I hope that, like Bridget, she will be managing to keep buggering on, play with the cards she is dealt, and laughing with her friends, who will tell her that she's absolutely fine – just as she is.