Overview
Bridget Jones Diary follows the fortunes of a single girl on an optimistic but doomed quest for self-improvement. Cheered by feminist ranting with her friends Jude. Shazzer and 'hag-fag' Tom, humiliated at Smug Marrieds' dinner parties, crazed by parental attempts to fix her up with a rich divorcee in a diamond-patterned sweater, Bridget lurches from torrid affair to pregnancy-scare convinced that if she could just get down to 8st 7, stop smoking and develop Inner Poise, all would be resolved.Bridget Jones First came to public attention in Helen Fielding's hugely popular fictional diary in the Independent newspaper. In this novel based on her creation, Fielding offers us a brilliantly funny picaresque tale: a year in the life of a girl determined to 'have it all' - the second she's finished this cigarette and phoned Shazzer.
Synopsis
Bridget Jones's Diary is the devastatingly self-aware, laugh-out-loud daily chronicle of Bridget's permanent, doomed quest for self-improvement a year in which she resolves to: reduce the circumference of each thigh by 1.5 inches, visit the gym three times a week not just to buy a sandwich, form a functional relationship with a responsible adult and learn to program the VCR.
Over the course of the year, Bridget loses a total of 72 pounds but gains a total of 74. She remains, however, optimistic. Through it all, Bridget will have you helpless with laughter, and like millions of readers the world round you'll find yourself shouting, "Bridget Jones is me!"
New York Times Book Review
Good-bye Rules Girls, hello Singletons...Endearingly engaging...v. funny..
Editorials
Entertainment Weekly
This juicy diary tells the truth with a verve as appealing to men on Mars as it is to Venusian women.Newsweek
An unforgettably droll character.San Francisco Chronicle
[W]ith satirical glee...and sharp, laugh-out-loud observations of contemporary life...Bridget Jones's Diary charts a year in the life of an unattached woman in her 30s.New York Times Book Review
Good-bye Rules Girls, hello Singletons...Endearingly engaging...v. funny..Daphne Merkin
[The book is] the sort of cultural artifact that is recognizably larger than itself. . . .[It] sits so lightly on the reader that it is easy to overlook the skill with which it has been assembled.— The New Yorker
Philadelphia Inquirer
Bridget's voice is dead-on . . . will cause readers to drop the book, grope frantically for the phone and read it out loud to their best girlfriends.Glamour
Fielding. . .has rummaged all too knowingly through the bedrooms, closets, hearts and minds of women everywhere.Publishers Weekly
A huge success in England, this marvelously funny debut novel had its genesis in a column Fielding writes for a London newspaper. It's the purported diary, complete with daily entries of calories consumed, cigarettes smoked, "alcohol units" imbibed and other unsuitable obsessions, of a year in the life of a bright London 30-something who deplores male "fuckwittage" while pining for a steady boyfriend. As dogged at making resolutions for self-improvement as she is irrepressibly irreverent, Bridget also would like to have someone to show the folks back home and their friends, who make "tick-tock" noises at her to evoke the motion of the biological clock. Bridget is knowing, obviously attractive but never too convinced of the fact, and prone ever to fear the worst. In the case of her mother, who becomes involved with a shady Portugese real estate operator and is about to be arrested for fraud, she's probably quite right. In the case of her boss, Daniel, who sends sexy e-mail messages but really plans to marry someone else, she's a tad blind. And in the case of glamorous lawyer Mark Darcy, whom her parents want her to marry, she turns out to be way off the mark. ("It struck me as pretty ridiculous to be called Mr. Darcy and to stand on your own looking snooty at a party. It's like being called Heathcliff and insisting on spending the entire evening in the garden, shouting `Cathy!' and banging your head against a tree.") It's hard to say how the English frame of reference will travel. But, since Bridget reads Susan Faludi and thinks of Goldie Hawn and Susan Sarandon as role models, it just might. In any case, it's hard to imagine a funnier book appearing anywhere this year.Library Journal
In the course of one year, Bridget Jones will consume 11,090,265 calories, smoke 5,277 cigarettes, and write a series of delightfully funny diary entries. This will be no ordinary year in the life of this single, on-the-cusp-of-30 Londoner. She's going to keep at least one New Year's resolution, have dates with two boyfriends, create legendary cooking disasters, and be seen on national TV going up a firehouse pole instead of the planned dramatic slide down. If that isn't enough, her mom is getting a new career as the host of the TV program 'Suddenly Single' and will disappear with a Portugese gigolo. Supported by friends and confused by family, Bridget emerges, if not triumphant, at least hopeful about life and love. Already a best seller in Britain and winner of the 'Publishing News' Book of the Year Award, this book should be equally popular in the United States. Jan Blodgett, Davidson Coll., NCDaphne Merkin
[The book is] the sort of cultural artifact that is recognizably larger than itself. . . .[It] sits so lightly on the reader that it is easy to overlook the skill with which it has been assembled. -- The New YorkerNew York Times Book Review
Bridget Jones's. . .name has become shorthand for the compulsive conduct of young women braving continually collapsing bridges to self-improvement, yet trying to maintain an amused perspective between bounding hope and tumbling defeat.Entertainment Weekly
This juicy diary tells the truth with a verve as appealing to men on Mars as it is to Venusian women.Philadelphia Inquirer
Bridget's voice is dead-on . . . will cause readers to drop the book, grope frantically for the phone and read it out loud to their best girlfriends.Newsweek
An unforgettably droll character.San Francisco Chronicle
[W]ith satirical glee...and sharp, laugh-out-loud observations of contemporary life...Bridget Jones's Diary charts a year in the life of an unattached woman in her 30s.NY Times Book Review
Good-bye Rules Girls, hello Singletons...Endearingly engaging...v. funny..Glamour
Fielding. . .has rummaged all too knowingly through the bedrooms, closets, hearts and minds of women everywhere.The New York Times
Bridget Jones's diary has made her the best friend of hundreds of thousands of women who recognize her closet drawers crammed with a fury of black opaque pantyhose twisted into ropelike tangles as their own.J. Jofre
Personally, I was afraid to meet Bridget Jones. She was a British phenomenon, a character out of author Helen Fielding's column in The Independent (now in The Telegraph), which I had never read, a character embodying English girldom so perfectly that women all over Britain were buying the book -- not just for themselves but for their mothers, their sisters, their bosses, and their friends who hate fiction. Bridget Jones's Diary swung up the English bestseller lists, and its reviews swelled the pages of serious newspapers as well as makeup mags with free beach pillows attached. There were giant posters in the tube stations proclaiming it "Nick Hornby for Girls." (I felt relieved to have known who Hornby was: the author of obsessive boy books like High Fidelity and Fever Pitch). At first, I adopted a cool expat's stance: As a married, childed American, I didn't expect to identify with Bridget-mania, plus as a literary snob I refused even to look. My British pals thought it was a great laugh, a fab read (well, actually, one of them said, "Yeah, it was all right," and when I said I'd expected a rave, she said, "That was a rave. I'm British; that's as enthusiastic as I get"). Then, irony of ironies, an American girlfriend sent it to me. It was coming out soon and it was hilarious; had I heard of it?I had heard of it.
Well, I was hooked immediately. And who wouldn't be? As Salman Rushdie's jacket blurb proclaims, "Even men will laugh." But it does seem to have become a women's book -- women who have dreamed about a kick-ass job, a choice figure, a cool boyfriend; women who have ever wanted to shop at posher stores, quit smoking, win the lottery, be free of their mothers while still having their support; women who have ever laughed at another's misfortune, who have ever loved a friend through humiliations. Women everywhere will find something familiar in this book, even if only a small thing: The friend who gave me the book recognized Bridget's frustration as she proposed weekend getaways to her boyfriend, who refused to plan anything in advance (the weekend was a disaster). A thing like that.
Fielding's book is a year in the life of Bridget Jones, from New Year's Day to Boxing Day. Single, 30-something Bridget keeps a down-to-the-minute journal of her thoughts, ideas, and obsessions. She tracks her daily intake of cigarettes, calories, lottery tickets, 1471 calls (that's *69 to you and me), negative thoughts. She seeks a weight of 8 1/2 stone (OK, some terms might baffle American readers) and Inner Poise. She confides in us, along with her friends, Sharon and Jude and "hag fag" Tom, about her affair with the boss (some Americans might also stumble over the blatant sexual harassment that's considered charming here in Europe, even if Bridget recognizes it as such and enjoys it), her pregnancy scare, her resentment of the "Smug Marrieds," and her mother's relentless efforts to set her up with a rich argyle-clad friend-of-the-family.
Bridget's voice and her diary shorthand are appealing and compelling; she manages to reveal a lot of intelligence and wit while focusing almost entirely on her weaknesses. On Saturday, August 12th, for example, having recently caught her boyfriend with a "bronzed giantess" and with a job interview looming, Bridget writes, "129 lbs. (still in very good cause), alcohol units 3 (v.g.), cigarettes 32 (v.v. bad, particularly since first day of giving up), calories 1,800 (g.), lottery tickets 4 (fair), no. of serious current affairs articles read 1.5, 1471 calls 22 (OK), minutes spent having cross imaginary conversations with Daniel 120 (v.g.), minutes spent imagining Daniel begging me to come back 90 (excellent)." At 8:35am she writes "No fags all day. Excellent." At 4:45pm, an old boyfriend calls with news of his engagement: "No-smoking policy in tatters.... Exes should never, never go out with or marry other people but should remain celibate to the end of their days in order to provide you with a mental fallback position.... Ugh. Have just smoked entire packet of Silk Cut as act of self-annihilating existential despair. Hope they both become obese and have to be lifted out of the window by crane."
Bridget's escapades are hilariously pathetic. She holds a dinner party designed to impress her date -- the menu is choked with veloutés and coulis and confits -- and ends up making her guests an omelet with the disastrous remains of the food. I dare anyone to say they've never gotten behind the eight ball like that. This exposé of human foibles has universal appeal -- after all, it's not just women who screw up dinner parties. And of course, Bridget does not represent all women, identify as we may with bits and pieces of her. Her story, though, lightheartedly reveals the frailties and the possibilities that are in all of us.
Laura Jofré is a freelance writer and reviewer living in London.
USA Today
Screamingly funny.Elle
[R]eaders will giggle and sigh with collective delight.The Washington Post
Hilarious but poignant.Elizabeth Gleick
[E]ndearingly engaging...v. funny.— New York Times Book Review