‘Bridget united the sisterhood’

But there was never anything very Oxford about Bridget: the ditsy-but-loveable, fag-wielder who somehow became the female archetype of the late 1990s.

When Fielding’s diary extracts from Bridget began appearing in The Independent, women everywhere went crazy: here was a voice not unlike ours who was obsessed with counting calories, drinking too many glasses of wine with girlfriends and (gay) boyfriends, and who also had the big-knicker-small-knicker debate before a big date.

Yes, we collectively nodded: yes, we know her. Of course there were faults – Bridget (in the film possibly more than in the books) is too much of a caricature, in the same way Miranda Hart’s Miranda is: scrabbling together dubious pieces of cheese from the fridge late at night I can associate with but I find myself losing all sympathy when she has to fish string from her blue gooey soup.

I mean, surely she’d heard of take-out? Bridget Jones in the late 1990s, aged thirty-something, was highly relevant for the ideas, aspirations, and pitfalls of a whole generation of women.

It was a time when Friends and Sex and the City were in their heyday, rejoicing the single life – or at least the “It’s ok to hang out with friends and bemoan the fact that you’re not dating life”, and the ladette culture was in full, beer-guzzling, swing.

This was the time of Spaced (remember that?) when living in large house shares and being a little bit hopeless, and a little bit unemployed was absolutely fine, so long as you had great friends to share a beer or cocktail with on a Friday night.

My generation learnt something invaluable from this; the power of friendship. It’s true that on the downside we may have learnt to stay perpetually young, slightly unable (and definitely unwilling) to grasp the notion that we must one day grow up, get a home of our own and tend the vegetable patch.

But at least we’re doing this all with a new appreciation of friends. I’m not trying to imply the older generations don’t know what friendship is – in a world filled with hundreds of Facebook “friends”, I’m sure some of their friendships are, and have been, much more meaningful than many of my own are now. But when I talk to my parents about it, they recount the fun they had as a young married couple: they roamed the streets in groups made primarily of pairs.

My generation learnt from Bridget that – in our increasingly stressful world, as individuals remain single deeper and deeper into their twenties and thirties – friends can be the only lifeline you have.

Bridget may have been a complete screw-up on more than one occasion but as she debriefed over cocktails with her friends, it suddenly didn’t matter.

In the modern friendily (those close friendship units who may as well be family) all of your sins, useless dreams and disasters could be spirited (literally) away.

The other point we took from Bridget was acceptance of oneself: here was a character who screamed; I’m a wreck just like you, I too would be mortified if anyone saw my secret, ridiculous behaviour. I have to count calories, and worry about underwear, and wax my bikini line while rehearsing conversations I can have over dinner. It’s not cool. But this is what I am. I’m sure you understand. And we did.

After the superwomen icons of the 80s, with their power shoulder-pads and bouffant hair and briefcases, here was a woman juggling all of the opportunities and freedom the last few decades had afforded her. At the same time, she highlighted just how many other traps women had made for themselves by their own liberation.

You can sleep with as many men as you please (and barely be judged for it) but by golly it’s hard work, both in the planning (hair removal, etc), the execution (awkward conversations over dinners and drinks) and the regrettable but subconscious knowledge that nothing can induce peaceful sleep more readily than a familiar, loving, warm body to snuggle up to, rather than a stranger’s cold side of the bed.

I may not agree with everything Bridget does – and I cringe at many of her escapades – but at least she mirrored how silly our minds can be. How ridiculous our ideas about self can be. How flawed and stupid and ditzy we can all sometimes be. And in mirroring all this, she somehow united the sisterhood, reminding us that we all know we have this secret behaviour, these conversations, these ridiculous insecurities we don’t want to admit to anyone beyond our tight inner circle.

This stripped away the 80s supergloss and said it’s ok, calm down, nobody here expects you to be perfect – in fact, we find you more endearing if you’re not.

As Fielding herself said in response to why the book was such a success it’s because it highlighted “the gap between how we feel we are expected to be and how we actually are”.

In an age when we are defined by online personas, and attacked by photo-shopped superhumans, this is probably more important than ever to remember.

REVIEW

Question: who wants to read about fifty-something women, worrying about the middle-aged spread and still obsessing over love? Answer: any woman who is – or at some point in the future will be – fifty-something, and worrying about the middle-aged spread (and indubitably still obsessing over love).

Pretty much all of us then.

It is on this premise that Bridget Jones’ creator Helen Fielding presumably developed the third instalment to Bridget’s never-ending stream of calamities that defines her life: Bridget Jones: Mad about the Boy.

The result could have been either raucously funny, or deeply meaningful – preferably a little of both.

Unfortunately, the laughs are in the form of mild sniggers, still riding on the back of Fielding’s tried and tested calorie counting/calorie devouring narrative, and Bridget’s hopeless meandering through life. And there is scope for meaningful material; Bridget is now sans Darcy, he having been killed “offstage” five years earlier.

There was always likely to come the problem that the recording of calories eaten, fags smoked and alcohol units consumed was going to get tired; so in a pre-emptive strike to offset this banality Fielding makes Bridget a 51-year-old widow with young children. Albeit still with the calorie obsession.

But the difficulty of doing this was obvious: how to make room for Bridget’s massive life changes (not to mention age change) while maintaining the ditzy Bridget a lot of young women associated with? How do you balance a widow’s grief with the lighthearted content we gleefully accepted from thirty-something Jones? Answer: you can’t.

The third book has the usual funny interchanges of calorie counting and mini dilemmas that characterised the first two books, (with added Twitter obsessions over how many followers she has, which is, I admit, quite amusing and embarrassingly true), which are solemnly punctuated with moments of sorrow that never really seem heartfelt: “On the doorstep the memories surged up again: the years when I would stand there with Mark, his hand on my back. He always had something kind and funny to say if I did something stupid.”

I imagine the generation of women who were Bridget’s age back in the 90s may well appreciate the ways in which her life has changed, and the pitfalls she faces as a result.

But for women who grew into the Bridget Jones mythology (women of my age for example, who were coming of age at about the time her Diary was first published and who are only now approaching the age of the stuff she was worrying about back then) her journal entries have lost a lot of their gloss and fun.

It should probably have been called “Bridget Jones tweets, dates, loses some weight and sometimes reminisces about her dead husband. Every now and again she remembers that she also has kids”.

In a nutshell: read it for light relief, for the odd nod of womanly association, and to assess exactly how many flashbacks of Colin Firth they’ll be able to manhandle into the film adaptation.

Just don’t expect belly laughs or earth-moving meaning: Bridget hasn’t matured that much.