Reading Bridget Jones’s Diary as a thirty-something

Gabi Lardies for now, Mad Chapman next week.

Despite allegations they’re filled with shit books, I cannot pass by a little library without having a peek inside. Two weeks ago, stretching my legs from a hard morning sitting on my non-ergonomic wheely chair, I spied two curious spines in the little library around the corner. In thin helvetica over a yellowed background, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, the lovely Claire Mabey is a Bridget fan and so perhaps there’s more to her than the floozy airhead caricature that sometimes pops up as a joke in conversation or memes. I grabbed the first book and slipped it stealthily into my bag back at the office, just in case being caught reading it would be a fireable offence for a writer in 2025.

Due to living under a partial rock, what I know of Bridget Jones is from the ripe old age of 11, when I wore bright pink pedal-pushers (!!) and lined up with my mum and her friend (or my older sister?) to watch the first film. I knew it was funny because my mum was laughing so hard she cried, but I missed the tragedy of the character. I thought Bridget Jones was very sophisticated, and gained an understanding that being in your thirties has a lot to do with drinking lots of wine.

A few days after smuggling the book out of work, I wiggled out my toes in a patch of sunlight on the floor and pretended not to be grossed out by the slightly sticky, dusty cover. “January: An Exceptionally Bad Start” begins the book. I cackled. The book really is written as a diary of its time, with Bridget tracking her weight and how many alcohol units, calories and cigarettes she’s consumed at the start of each entry. Apparently she is worryingly light, but with the measurements being in stones and pounds, I was blissfully unaware. Later in the book, things like “hours spent thinking about Mark Darcy” are counted too. Proper prose gives way to annotated transcriptions of phone calls with her mother, lists of new years resolutions, people to invite to her party and all of Bridget’s darkest most frivolous thoughts. Best of all there’s an idiosyncratic voice that becomes a whole language, “Smug Marrieds”, “singleton”, “v.g.” [very good] and “Durr!”. Like Shakespeare, Bridget Jones expanded the English language by coining “singleton” and “mentionitis”.

Bridget Jones was conceived in the mid-90s when Helen Fielding was working at The Independent. Columns were having a moment, and the paper asked her to write one about single life in London. She refused as she thought it would be “embarrassing and exposing”, so an editor suggested that she write it as an imaginary character. Feilding would go on to say, “Because it’s an imaginary character, you can hide behind a persona. It also allows you to write the sort of shameful thoughts that everyone has but no one wants to admit to, since you’re not trying to make anyone like you”. As it turns out, the world loved Bridget Jones.

At first, Fielding felt “stupid” writing about calories and alcohol units when there were “a lot of very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya”. While politics and being clever are certainly important, Bridget Jones has brought so much joy to so many people, and in her own way, is an astute commentator of modern life. It’s something to hold on to for a thirty-something-year-old writer whose most popular story ever is Why is every bikini bottom a thong now?

That sunny day I did not stop cackling until about halfway through the book, when a thought struck my heart. I’d left the second book behind. I fretted that some other passerby had scooped it up, away from my little hands. On Monday morning, The Edge of Reason was still there in the little library and shortly after in my bag. v.g.

This week on Behind the Story

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