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As the author of diaries, even fictional ones, Fielding invites all sorts of intimacies. The charm that transfixed Richard Curtis at Oxford still operates. At a lunch celebrating Fielding at BookExpo America this summer, two guests whisked her aside to show her their identical Bridget Jones tattoos featuring a wine bottle festooned with a banner that reads no emotional f---wittage (a Bridget-ism fit for the Oxford English Dictionary). One of the tattooed pair, book blogger and librarian Stephanie Anderson, sums up what Fielding's work has meant to many women over the years: "It's like an old friend. The older I get, the funnier the books get."
Austen's plots are marriage plots, and ultimately so are Bridget's. But Fielding's novels (like Austen's, and like Sex and the City and Girls) also revolve around friendship--something at which Bridget excels. Nor is the character's staying power an accident. Fielding may have become a celebrity, but she is still very much a writer. "She has an amazing ear for rhythm in dialogue," says Meloy. Fielding loves 19th century novelists because their chief goal was to make you turn the page. (She likes Jonathan Franzen because he does that too.) She reminisces about being alone with her laptop, the weaving of threads through a novel, the craft of composition. She's a fan of Susan Cain's book Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking.
And as someone whose first reaction to literary success was to "pretend it hadn't happened" and run off to a country cottage for six months, Fielding is attuned to the pitfalls of fame. "I think if I ever did do another one, I'd do Bridget Jones Becomes a Celebrity, because it is pretty funny," she says. "But I won't do that." So she says, but she can't know for certain when Bridget's voice might return.