Reading Bridget Jones's diary as a few years old

Gabi lards for now, Mad Chapman next week.

Despite the allegations of being full of shit books, I can’t go through a small library without taking a look inside. Two weeks ago, stretching my legs in a lasting morning sitting on my unhealthy chair, I saw two curious thorns in the small library around the corner. In fine helvetics on a yellowish background, the Diary of Bridget Jones and Bridget Jones: the edge of reason. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, the lovely Claire Mabey is a Bridget fan and therefore maybe there is more than the FluTuzy Airhead caricature that sometimes appears as a joke in conversations or memes. I grabbed the first book and slid it off my bag back in the office, just for being reading, it would be a disparable offense for a writer in 2025.

Due to living under a partial rock, what I know of Bridget Jones is from the age of 11, when I used bright pink pedal fills (!!) and aligned with my mother and friend (or my older sister?) To watch the first movie. I knew it was funny because my mother was laughing so much that she cried, but I lost the tragedy of the character. I thought Bridget Jones was very sophisticated and understood that being in his thirty house has a lot to do with drinking a lot of wine.

A few days after smuggling the book out of work, stirred my feet under a piece of sunlight on the floor and pretended not to be disgusted with the slightly sticky and dusty cover. “January: An exceptionally bad start” begins the book. I curl. The book is really written as a diary of its time, with Bridget tracking its weight and how many units of alcohol, calories and cigarettes it is consumed at the beginning of each entrance. Apparently it is worryingly light, but with stones and pound measurements, I didn’t know happily. Later in the book, things like “past hours thinking about Mark Darcy” are also told. The proper prose gives way to phone calls with your mother, New Year’s lists of resolutions, people to invite your party and all the most frivolous Bridget thoughts. Best of all there is an idiosyncratic voice that becomes an entire tongue, “Smog. Married”, “Singleton”, “VG” [very good] and “Durr!”. Like Shakespeare, Bridget Jones has expanded the English language coinning “Singleton” and “Mechania”.

Bridget Jones was conceived in the mid -1990s, when Helen Fielding was working at The Independent. The columns were having a moment, and the newspaper asked her to write one about the unique life in London. She refused how she thought it would be “embarrassing and exposed,” then an editor suggested that she write him as an imaginary character. Feilding would continue to say, “Because you are an imaginary character, you can hide behind a persona. It also allows you to write the kind of shameful thinking that everyone has, but nobody wants to admit, since you are not trying to make anyone like you. ” As it turns out, the world loved Bridget Jones.

At first, Fielding looked “stupid” writing about calories and alcohol units when there were “many very intelligent and experienced journalists who were writing about New Labor and Chechnya.” Although politics and intelligence are certainly important, Bridget Jones has brought so much joy to so many people and, in his own way, is a cunning commentator of modern life. It’s something to cling to a little -thirty writer whose most popular story of all time is every bikini a panties now?

That sunny day, I didn’t stop singing to half the book, when a thought hit my heart. I left the second book behind. I worried that some other passerby caught him away from my small hands. On Monday morning, the border of reason was still there in the small library and soon after in my bag. VG

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