“It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.” Bridget Jones tells us this in her first diary, written by Helen Fielding in 1996. The first book’s final quote resonates, once again, in Fielding’s third instalment.
The neuroticism of the first two books continues in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. One thing we can say for sure is that Bridget is constant in just one thing – her ability to juggle, drop everything, and somehow get back up and juggle again.
In between the second book and this, much has happened. She married Mark Darcy, had two children, and is then widowed. Despite the significant life changes, it’s an easy book to get into. She’s advanced from the thirty-something singleton wholly obsessed with her love life that we first met to an early-fifties mother partially obsessed with it.
Fielding is brutally realistic about her ability to handle Mark’s death and keep on going. Particularly gratifying was the decision to leave out the grief years that we see regularly glamourised and, instead, brought us in five years later when Bridget’s identity is more than that of a widow or a new parent and she is beginning to get a grasp on her life again.
She remains typically Bridget — pledging to never get upset over men, to remain a poised and cool and then breaking the pledge on multiple occasions. But she is less likely to be pushed around by others. Relying on her urban family for moral support, babysitting, Twitter guidelines and dating advice, Bridget’s life realistically represents the juggling act that is everyday life for so many modern women.
What will resonate with many is the struggle to try and create a career after a hiatus or significant life event. Despite having a nanny, a luxury not many women can boast, her attempt to be a screenwriter while being a single mother is brutally honest. It’s not easy, and there will be moments in meetings where you’ll be trying not to pick nits out of your hair, while dying to be home for a glass of wine and leftover microwaved fish fingers.
Bridget’s relationships remain a central theme but there’s more of a sense that these are additions to her life rather than the focus. Where she would have been crushed by some of these new relationship mishaps in the earlier novels, she is now only momentarily so.
Bridget remains frustratingly hopeless, saying one thing and doing the exact opposite, but standing next to the militant mother who drags her children up with forced extracurriculars and analysis of their ranking in classes, it’s nice to see a different type of success.
She is someone who finds herself swearing in earshot of her kids, struggling with fluctuating weight, wearing a g-string while climbing a tree and frantically calling Daniel Cleaver to babysit. She loves her children to death and, despite it all, is a good mother.
Fielding has an unusual ability to weave a profound message into comedy and to turn a flawed fifty-something into a role model. One excellent example of the depth of this book is Bridget’s script that she is pitching to production companies.
It’s a modern day reworking of Hedda Gabler (or Gabbler, if you spell it as Bridget does) by Henrik Ibsen who, more popularly, wrote A Doll’s House. The plot of the original revolves around Hedda, the daughter of an aristocrat, who marries not for love but because she is potentially pregnant and fears ageing. The tragic play, which ends in Hedda’s death, has some fairly interesting contrasts and similarities to modern day life and to this book. Even if they do want to film Bridget’s version “on a yacht in Hawaii with a Paris/Gstaad feel”.
As always with Bridget Jones you will laugh out loud, cry (three times by my count), shake your head and fall in love with her all over again.
Quotes you don’t want to miss:
“…it’s a bit like if we were on a planet where all the space creatures were short, green and fat. Except a very few of them were tall, thin and yellow. And all the advertising was of the tall, yellow ones, airbrushed to make them even taller and yellower.”
“…after a certain age, people are just going to do what they’re going to do and you’re either going to accept them as they are or you’re not.”
“We cannot avoid pain, we cannot avoid loss. Contentment comes from the ease and flexibility with which we move through change.”