In March 2012, Helen Fielding made a note in her diary. She had been writing up comic scenes of London life in random files on her computer--"Just little moments," she says, "the funny things that happen"--and she suddenly wondered if she could turn them into a book. This is the kind of thing that could happen to any writer, but the next thing could happen only to Fielding. "I realized the voice was Bridget's," she says. "And I thought, That's going to raise the stakes a bit."
Bridget, of course, is Bridget Jones, Fielding's archetypal late-20th-century single woman, whom we last saw as a calorie-counting, career-addled 30-something with an overbearing mother, a circle of boozy friends and a library of ineffective self-help books. With plots loosely based on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, Bridget Jones's Diary and the sequel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, rode the wave of the '90s Austen boom (alongside Amy Heckerling's Clueless and the BBC's Pride and Prejudice, among many other updates) while making giant waves of their own, selling 15 million copies worldwide and launching two successful films. Fans related to Bridget's anxieties about her diet and love life, while feminist critics deplored her for obsessing about the same. A 2007 Guardian poll declared Bridget Jones's Diary one of the 10 books that best defined the 20th century, along with Catch-22, The Great Gatsby and 1984.
Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (out Oct. 15) picks up in 2012 with Bridget at 51, a single mother back on the dating scene, still seeking inner poise and her ideal weight. At first, Fielding kept mum about reviving her heroine for the 21st century. She wasn't being coy; she was reliving a time of no expectations. Bridget Jones began life in 1995 as the fictitious byline of a weekly newspaper column about the madcap life of a single girl. Even Fielding's best friends didn't know she was writing it. With the new book, she says, "I could be very honest in the way that I was when I first started writing Bridget, because no one was interested." It may sound like a paradoxical desire from a writer, but then, this is the year that J.K. Rowling was outed for publishing detective fiction under a pseudonym. And what Rowling is to young-adult fantasy, Fielding is to thinking-woman's comedy.
The Mill Maiden's Tale
Fielding grew up in Morley, Yorkshire, a textile town with dozens of mills, one of which was managed by her father. At 15, during school holidays, she worked in the weaving shack, pulling leftover wool from bobbins. (She is aware that this sounds absurdly Dickensian.) She went to university at St. Anne's College, Oxford, where she fell in with a creative set including actor Rowan Atkinson (Blackadder, Mr. Bean) and Richard Curtis, who went on to write Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. "She was performing in a play," Curtis recalls about their first meeting. "She was dressed as Marlene Dietrich. She was very, very pretty and not very good at acting."