Opinions of a Wolf

A Delightful Start

My first encounter with Bridget Jones’s Diary was the 2001 movie starring Renee Zellweger, Hugh Grant, and Colin Firth. I remember stumbling onto it on my dad’s satellite tv when I was in high school. I’d long loved epistolary novels, but especially anything diary based. (The Dear America series was an early obsession.) Even in high school, I loved New Year’s Resolutions, and the idea of reinventing and improving myself. So those two incredible opening scenes of the movie when Bridget goes to a diastrous New Year’s Day turkey curry buffet and then subsequently decides to reinvent herself with New Year’s Resolutions and a diary to keep herself accountable drew me in immediately. From that point on, rewatching the movie became a holiday season/January tradition for me.

What’s This Diary About Anyway?

For those of you who don’t know, Bridget Jones’s Diary is a romcom told through Bridget’s diary entries for one full year. She’s a woman in her early 30s living in London and working in publishing. She spends the year initially falling for her boss at work, Daniel Cleaver, and later for Mark Darcy, a human rights barrister her mother tried to set her up with. Other key plot elements include the hang outs, trials, and travails of her friends (both singletons and marrieds), her mother and father’s late in life marriage troubles, and her ongoing quest for self-improvement, including struggles with alcohol, cigarettes, instants (the lottery), and delightful asides like why it takes her 3 hours to get ready in the morning.

Discovering the Book

A few years later, I finally picked up the book, and I was blown away. How could a movie I loved so much be even better in book form?! I could scarcely believe it. The audiobook version as read by Imogen Church is my go-to when I’m having trouble sleeping or am under a lot of stress and need to just relax for a bit. Her reading of Bridget is simply perfection.

Why Do I Love Bridget So Much, Exactly?

1. how each entry starts

At the start of each diary entry are some things that Bridget tracks. What exactly she’s tracking changes throughout the book. The key items are her weight, calories consume, alcohol drunk, cigarettes smoked, and instants (lottery tickets) bought. But there are other trackings that pop in like number of smoothies consumed or number of times called 1471 (like American *69 only it tells you what number called you rather than ringing them back). I love data and statistics and tracking the mundane things in my life. The lists at the start of each entry make me laugh because they remind me of myself, and they provide a different type of insight into Bridget. I also love how she self-comments on each item, especially how she will say “v.g.” for “very good.” This is one of those pop cultureisms that has made it into my own daily life.

2. depiction of diet culture

Sometimes I hear people talking about Bridget Jones (especially those who’ve only seen the movie), and they complain specifically about Bridget’s obsession with her weight when she is, in fact, a healthy weight. To them I say, that’s the point! This book is an amazing take-down of 1990s diet culture. Bridget is a healthy weight. But she doesn’t think she is. And anytime she’s having problems, she thinks they might be magically solved if she was “no longer fat.” In fact, in diary entries when Bridget is feeling particularly down are when she is most likely to berate herself for her size.

There are two episodes in the book that really drive home the fact that this is a critique of diet culture. The first is that Bridget does get down to her goal weight. She goes to a party with her friends and is ecstatic for them to see her. But they express concern. They don’t think she looks well. Her friend Tom tells her she looked better before. She has a bit of a breakthrough and wonders if her calorie counting is unhealthy and stops tracking them for a while. But then something stressful happens and she begins again. The second episode is when the same friend Tom wonders about how many calories are in something, and Bridget recites the precise number off to him. He’s shocked she knows this then proceeds to quiz her on the number of calories in various things, all of which she knows off the top of her head. She asks doesn’t everyone know this? To which Tom emphatically tells her know. Bridget briefly wonders what other information she could have stored in her head if it wasn’t so busy with calories. Amazing! Just because Bridget never breaks free of her disordered eating doesn’t mean the book itself isn’t criticizing the culture that inflicted it upon her to begin with.

3. Bridget is gloriously imperfect

At the beginning of the book Bridget drinks too much alcohol and smokes cigarettes. She struggles to get to anything on-time. One could say her doing things is always a series of unfortunate calamities. None of this really changes by the end of the year. One could argue that she kind of fails at the majority of her New Year’s Resolutions. But the thing that does change is that Bridget has started to like the core of who she is, and that in turn has made it possible for her to open up to a kind man, instead of, as she would say, the fuckwits she’s been dating previously. She’s become a bit kinder to herself about the flaws that aren’t really flaws per se but just personality quirks (like her complete inability to do anything efficiently). But she’s also very willing to keep trying on the things she probably should still be improving on (like the number of cigarettes she smokes). She simply feels real.

4. it’s hysterically funny

Part of what makes the book funny is, due to its diary entry nature, not every single scene necessarily contributes to the main plot, although each one does help with character development. As such, we get some scenes that are just simply bananas hysterical that a book with a different structure might have left out. One of my favorites is when Bridget decides to study herself to see why it takes her so long to get out the door in the morning. We then get time-stamped entries of each activity she does. It’s gloriously inefficient (including imagining her taking the time to actually write all of this down when she’s already running late to work…but she does it anyway.) Even secondary characters are richly imagined, which I think is probably partially due to the fact that Helen Fielding based many of them on people in her real life (she discusses this in the special 25th anniversary edition). Everyone in Bridget’s world, even her over-the-top batshit mother, feels real. And that’s part of what makes it so funny. It’s easy to imagine all of this really happening.

Review of the 25th Anniversary Edition

For my birthday this year, my husband gifted me the 25th anniversary edition of Bridget Jones. It’s a beautiful hardcover with a foil embossing of Bridget’s famous granny panties on the cover. Even more exciting, it has over 100 pages of new and unpublished material from Helen Fielding.

The first section is “Life Before Bridget” which gives a selection of some of Helen’s journalism articles from before Bridget took off. (Bridget was originally a newspaper column before becoming a book). I loved seeing Helen’s development as a writer and especially the context she gave. My favorite was a restaurant review in which she explains she went with her two best friends who were the inspiration for Jude and Shazzer in the book. I could hear echoes of those two in the restaurant review and absolutely loved it.

The second section is “The Diary of Bridget Jones” in which she explains how the idea for Bridget came to be, and we get selections from some of the initial Bridget newspaper articles.

Next is “Bridget Becomes a Thing,” which includes her interview with Colin Firth in character as Bridget, comics from the time period that reference Bridget, and Helen’s reflections on how it felt to realize she had written a cultural touchstone.

The next section is “Bridget in the 21st Century,” which are Bridget diary entries from 2018 on that Helen wrote for a variety of reasons from inclusion in a feminism book to addressing Brexit to the whole…2020 thing.

There is also an Introduction and a Conclusion written in Helen’s voice but int he style of a Bridget diary entry.

I had to stop saying “I loved it” after the end of each section explanation. It was getting ridiculously repetitive. It’s so rare for me to get to know an author better and enjoy their work more as a result. In all honesty I usually try to avoid getting to know an author because I don’t want things ruined for me. This had the opposite effect on me. I could see being friends with Helen. She’s witty and down-to-earth. I especially liked one section where she talked about people asking her about why she wrote something so silly and why she didn’t write more serious things and how her response was her first book was very serious (set in a war zone or something, I don’t remember), and no one wanted to read it. But they did want to read this. And that’s just the sort of smart commentary that’s throughout the book too. Posh people can try to judge Bridget for how she is, but how she is is, in fact, at least partially a survival response to how the world is. She’s doing her best in a good-natured sort of way in a world that seems to constantly harshly critique her no matter what.

It’s probably obvious by now this is 5 out of 5 stars from me.

Buy the 25th Anniversary Edition (Amazon not available on Bookshop.org)

Buy the Audiobook Read by Imogen Church (Amazon not available on Bookshop.org)

Buy the Movie (Amazon or Bookshop.org)

Length: 464 pages (25th anniversary edition) – chunkster
310 pages (original content) – average but on the longer side

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