Bridget Jones's Diary
is one of the few instances where I've seen the movie before I read the book, and I've seen the movie what seems like one hundred times. I really didn't even have any desire to read the book until I saw that Nick Hornby had called Helen Fielding hilarious. I got the book from Bookmooch and it had me laughing out loud the whole time I was reading it. Bridget Jones is 30, slightly chubby, a bit of an alcoholic, and totally obsessed with her boss who is not interested in her (or at least she thinks it's that way). Her mother is constantly trying to set her up with suitable men even though her mother isn't happy in her own marriage and has gone running around with some new man, leaving Bridget's dad alone and quite sad. On top of everything else, she's just got bad luck it seems. Always saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, burning this, ruining that, and tripping over herself. In short, Bridget Jones is every woman everywhere, or at least she was me. I felt, and that's what made me keep reading.
This is set up in a series of diary entries and I think Fielding did a good job of making the entries fairly believable but still moving the story along. There are times when Bridget goes several days without writing and then days where she writes ten pages. Any time I've kept a diary this has generally been my pattern too, so I found that easy to believe. The only thing that is hard to believe is how funny Bridget is in her diary, but I'll forgive that since it's what made the book so charming. At the beginning of each entry Bridget lists her weight and pounds lost, her number cigarettes so she can measure trying to quit, and the number of calories she's had. There are other things she lists throughout the book, such as alcohol units and number of times looked at her boss, Daniel Cleaver, but these depend on what existential crisis she is dealing with at the time. I could relate to her weight gain and loss since I have spent my whole life basically trying to lose weight, although I did think that her weight was a little low to be obsessing over. Of course, I'm six feet tall so I think anything under 150 pounds is pretty low weight.
I enjoyed how the whole book wasn't entirely focused on men even though that was a huge part of it. One of the things I found really interesting was how Bridget's middle-aged mother was trying to live a new life since she thought no one really needed her anymore and she had spent her whole life taking care of her family. I've experienced this with my own mother and also saw it in Tales of a Female Nomad, which I recently finished. It seems like it's common for middle-aged women to search for something new in their lives, almost as if they've been disappointed with what they've ended up with. It's rather sinister, but it made me wonder if Bridget would be happy with her decisions in the long run or not. At the same time, Bridget isn't all that happy with her decisions in the present of the book, she changes a lot of of things but one thing that always stays the same is her friends. It was nice to see a woman who relied on her friends more than anything else instead of just a boyfriend or crush.
I give Bridget Jones's Diary an A.
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