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He was struck, though, by her self-deprecating sense of humor. "That contradiction was so extraordinary," Curtis says--this sharp, attractive woman who looked on herself as a figure of fun. He immediately asked her to be his girlfriend. Instead they became friends. A few years later, when Curtis launched the pilot program of Comic Relief, his fundraising effort for famine victims in East Africa, he called on Fielding to help produce and host satellite segments from Sudan. Her voice, with its appealing directness, set the project apart from a traditional news documentary. "She kicked off the style and informal personal nature of these fundraising films, through which we've raised about $1.5 billion over the years," Curtis says.
Fielding's first novel, Cause Celeb--a cynical take on celebrity involvement in global tragedies--was inspired by those events. It earned good reviews but sold poorly. She worked jobs in television and journalism and started a second, "unreadable" novel set in the Caribbean. In the meantime, she began secretly writing her Bridget Jones columns for the Independent: vignettes from the wine-sloshed nights and hungover mornings of an unmarried Londoner, with the texture of true life exaggerated to hilarious effect. In the not-so-distant past, Bridget would have been called a spinster. Fielding, sick of women being written off if they hadn't settled down by their 30s, called her a singleton.
She didn't claim authorship at first. Fielding was used to amusing her friends in private, not in public. But about six weeks after the column debuted, her good friend Tracey MacLeod mentioned that she thought it was funny. Happy and relieved, Fielding took credit. "I don't think I would have dared write Bridget if I thought anyone was going to read it," she says. "And I don't think anyone would have let me if they thought anyone was going to read it. Someone would have come in with a pen and said, 'Well, that doesn't make sense, and that's not a sentence, and who cares why it takes three hours between getting up in the morning and leaving the house?'" But nobody ordered Fielding to stick verbs after Bridget's infectious exclamations ("Gaaah!") or transform her into a morning person. The column gained traction, and Fielding turned it into her second book, which became a word-of-mouth hit.
Between the Diary's Lines
Bridget Jones's Diary was published in 1996, one year before the debut of Ally McBeal and two years before Sex and the City. In cultural terms, it harks back a generation, when the royal wedding you'd woken up early to watch on TV was Princess Diana's. In technological terms, it is a relic from the Analog Age. No one texts or e-mails; they sit by plugged-in phones and listen to messages on answering machines. (At one point Bridget expresses NSA-surveillance-level horror at that invasive American invention, caller ID.) But if Bridget's world feels archaeological, she also cuts a prescient figure for today's urban women, deferring choices about marriage and childbearing, seesawing between professional ambition and ambivalence, and trying to have it all while also feeling free to drink quite a lot of chardonnay.