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The diary, too, was prescient. With its time-stamped bursts of self-effacing updates it suggests a proto-Twitter feed. Bridget's cigarette and calorie counts read as precursors to the quantified self. Through Bridget's voice Fielding introduced a new vernacular. "She coins brilliant expressions," says MacLeod, a journalist and talent agent who, together with director Sharon Maguire, provided inspiration for Bridget's best friends Jude and Shazzer. "I'd never heard the expression 'minibreak' before she used it. 'Singleton.' 'Smug married.'" The original serial form had helped Fielding keep current. "It was like Girls," MacLeod says. "She was making comedy every week." And Fielding's brand of humor could sustain a book-length work without sacrificing its empathetic nature. "So often comedy is condescending about the people it's about, and Bridget is never like that," says Curtis.
Carrie Fisher, a friend of Fielding's for more than 20 years, remembers a dinner party Fielding attended at her home with a bunch of comedy writers, mostly male, one of whom advanced the theory that all comedy is based on cruelty. "That shocked her," Fisher says. "The reason she didn't see it is that the humor is aimed at herself." To critics of Bridget (lately reborn as critics of Lena Dunham's Hannah Horvath) who wish she would get her act together, Fielding argues that humor couched in vulnerability is an expression of confidence. "If we can't laugh at ourselves, we haven't got very far," she says. "To say we're like this fragile minority--it's nonsense."
Fans were horrified to learn through an excerpt published in the Sunday Times on Sept. 29 that in the new novel--spoiler alert for those unacquainted with the Internet--the author had killed off Bridget's love interest, Mark Darcy. Those already in the know were Fielding's small circle of early readers: Knopf's editor in chief Sonny Mehta, her editor Jennifer Jackson and the author Maile Meloy, who has been friends with Fielding for over a decade. (They met at a party in Los Angeles, when Fielding was introduced to Meloy, in an act of inebriated cultural conflation, as the author of "Bridget Potter's Diary.") "I was as attached to Darcy as anyone was, but Bridget moving on without him is a far more interesting story," Meloy says. "I don't need to read that never-written novel about married life with Mr. Darcy, in which he gets the kids to school on time."
Fielding says Mark's death was "absolutely inherent from the start." As a woman in her 50s, Bridget would naturally have suffered losses. "The jokes in Bridget do come from something real," Fielding says. "Pain and confusion and those quite serious things." She got some fun out of it in real life when breaking the news to Colin Firth, who played Mark in both films. She tried to see him in person, but the scheduling didn't work out. "So I ended up telling him he died on the phone," she says, laughing. "I had to ask him if he had someone with him and if he was sitting down."