NEW MOVIE OUT NOW! Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

Helen Fielding, British journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and creator of the beloved fictional character Bridget Jones, joins Zibby to celebrate the 25th anniversary edition of BRIDGET JONES’S DIARY, the #1 bestselling book that defined the 20th century. Helen shares the unexpected origins of Bridget—born from an anonymous newspaper column written simply to pay the bills—and how her honest, exaggerated take on single life struck a universal chord. She and Zibby discuss humor as a coping mechanism, the changing landscape of workplace sexism, and why Bridget’s self-deprecating charm continues to resonate across generations. Helen also teases the upcoming film adaptation of Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, touching on how Bridget navigates love, loss, and aging with her signature wit.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Helen. I am so excited to have you here on Totally Booked with Zibby to talk about Bridget Jones's diary and your new anniversary edition with even more Bridget. So thank you for that. We, we, we missed her. So that was awesome. Congrats. 

Helen: It's great to be here. And, uh, it's, it's sort of unbelievable that people are still reading and talking about Bridget.

After all this time, I had literally no idea. I started writing it as a. newspaper column anonymously when I was trying to be a serious literary journalist and novelist. And I just, they asked me to write a column as myself because I was like a single girl in my 30s in London and the newspapers were full of columns about single girls and their sex lives and things.

I said, no, no, no, no, no. But I will make someone up and keep it anonymous. And I just, it was literally a way of paying the mortgage and then everyone started to praise it. So I said, it's me. It's me. If I'd known that all these years later and so many people would have read it, I wouldn't have dared write any of those things.

That was the emotional honesty that perhaps made people relate to it because I just didn't think it would ever be exposed really. 

Zibby: And you, you write about this in the new section in the back of the book, which I loved learning about and hearing about the journey and how Bridget was just like someone in your office, right?

Isn't that what you said? And you just like liked that name or a friend of someone in your office, something like that. 

Helen: Do you know, like newspapers are always on a deadline, they were like, okay, yes. do it quickly now. They took a picture of the secretary in the office. It was very, very pretty and sort of, it's a lovely picture.

So she got a lot of sort of hassle. It was pre Me Too. And then I had a friend at work, when I was working at the BBC, and she was always talking about her friend Bridget, who was always getting into trouble. Bridget this and Bridget that. And then they were like, okay, well, what's the surname? So I just said, Jones, just, it was, it was that casual.

And then later someone pointed out to me, of course, Henry Fielding and Tom Jones. So then I said, yes, of course it was, um, a literary illusion. 

Zibby: Yes. 

Helen: But it wasn't, we were just in a terrible panic and just sort of made it up. 

Zibby: And you said also when you were thinking about, you know, serious versus non serious journalism, and you're like, my first novel was based, you know, we had this very serious premise and a journalist went to where Africa or, you know, somewhere to volunteer.

And you're like, you're like, but nobody read that. So thanks very much. 

Helen: Exactly. And you know, when Bridget came out, there's also so silly and trivial. And I'm like, people, I wrote one set in a refugee camp. 

Zibby: Yeah, a refugee camp. 

Helen: I think lots of people have read that book now. But I think, you know, I think the thing is with Bridget, it's not, it was never intended as anything.

It was, it was just a pretty honest little column. But exaggerated, obviously. I mean, and then, It became more of a sort of, as if it was a sociological statement, but it was just a piece of emotional honesty. So I think the interesting thing is the reaction to it. It's not the character herself, it's why do people respond to her, is the interesting question.

And why do you think? I think it is that peeping behind the curtains into It's really, I mean, I was baffled by this. I just couldn't understand that I would go to Japan on the first book tour. These beautiful, slim, successful women relating to the anxieties and worries about weight and worries about being good enough that I was writing about.

Um, I came to the conclusion that it is at heart about the gap between how you feel you are supposed to be and how you really are. That's the thing with Bridget, it's the gap between intention, I am not going to sleep with him, and what actually happens, cut to, she is in bed with him, and it's It's always that, I think, that's at the heart of it.

It's that sort of kinetic thing that makes the joke, which still goes on in my life. You know, my every time I try and get above myself or more organized than I can be, for example, when my Daughter was born. She was born by C section. And I thought I'll get ahead of the game here. I'm going to do the birth announcement, you know, get the email ready.

And, you know, this is the day she's been born. This is her name do. And instead of pressing save, I press send all so that everyone I knew got this. announcement and then I had to email them all to say I'm really sorry I haven't actually had a baby. Who does that? And then when I did that I couldn't then send another one saying actually I have had a baby now.

So that was, that was just me getting a bit too organised. beyond my capabilities, but it was really funny. So I think I find the way women relate to each other. I mean, I'm not a sociologist, but I find is what we do is we form little communities and we support each other by telling each other stories like that.

We don't say, Oh, I'm marvelous and I'm thin and I'm successful. And we say, Oh my God, you'll never guess what I've just done. Get me a glass of wine and then laugh and. share that we're all kind of human and we muck things up, but we're still kind of nice and mean for the best and love each other. And I think that's the way Bridget works.

It's, it's reassuring that everyone's life is a bit of a mess behind the curtains, you know, we're not all perfect and that you can still, it's all right. That's what, that's life, that's people, you know. 

Zibby: I think you're right. I think you get to the heart of what makes us who we are, right? How can any of us be perfect?

And you don't know, right? I find it so crazy. We walk down the street and nobody knows. They don't know what we're going through. where we are in our lives, like, what's on our plates, and yet you have to be like, yes, I'm fine. Everything's great. How are you? Like, let me check out here. And of course, that's not what it's like, but you have to, the way that you captured it, though, other people have, have tried, right?

Quote unquote, to do this, right? Other people want to be emotionally honest and, and vulnerable. But the humor, I think also is what makes. this so great because we could just beat ourselves up all day long about all the things, but instead you give us permission to laugh at ourselves, which I think we all need because it can feel so oppressive.

Helen: Well, exactly. I mean, I think that that I think humor is a really good way of processing the world. It's. Because it's, for a start, it makes you happy to laugh, and it's bonding. But basically, all jokes come out of something which doesn't fit together. That's what makes the little atomic explosion that makes the joke.

So comedy and tragedy are sort of the same thing. And so sometimes people say to me, get angry, Helen, you know, don't, don't be all funny. Um, I don't choose to get angry. You know, obviously things have happened to me, like they happen to everybody. And as you live a longer life, you go through all sorts of things.

But my choice is to deal with things by finding the funny side of it. And that is also the choice of. my friends and the family that I grew up with. You know, I grew up in the north of England in a mill town where it was a rather sooty and the basic currency there was just laughing at things, you know, laughing together about things, having fun.

Fun was a thing. It was a concept. So I, I do actually think it's, um, quite an intelligent way of processing the world. And much better than going like that. 

Zibby: What has happened? Has anything happened lately since the childbirth? Like, what's something that happened yesterday that you thought was funny?

Helen: Something that happened recently, which was that, okay, this was in the summer. Because we all know with climate change, There are extremes of climate, so at the moment it's freezing here, but in the summer it was boiling and there's no air con. And I was sunbathing out in the back, and the doorbell rang at the front.

So I sort of wrapped a kind of towel around me and went to get the, you know, Amazon package. But then the door shut behind me, so then I was stuck basically in my underwear and a towel with no shoes and no phone. I couldn't get back in the house. Um, I thought about going to the kids school and I thought, I don't want to land there like this.

I can't ring anyone up. So I sort of loped around the corner to my friend's house and rang the doorbell, because I know she's got a spare key, but only her husband was in. So he said, come in, come in, come in. And he was having some problem that, you know, we always process our problems. So he said, come sit out the back.

And then he was talking through this thing. And then there was a key in the door and it was Jules. And I thought, oh my God, how am I going to explain that I'm alone in the house with a husband in my underwear with a towel wrapped around me in this sort of disheveled piece. And if it had been anyone else, except such good friends, you know, it would have obviously looked like I was having an affair with her husband, but It never occurred to either of them, but, you know, you could see how that could happen.

You could see how it all could happen. And that's the thing about jokes in Bridget. It's not like she's always falling over and landing in a puddle. It's things that you can actually see how they happened. It's like when I made the blue soup in the first book. I was rushing. I got above myself. I was going to make this really fancy dinner.

I wanted to make vichyssoise for unexplained reasons because My friends knew it was all confused and it said tie some links and things together with string and I only have blue string I thought it'd be fine and then pour cream and okay fine fine and then looked at it And I thought, Oh God, it's blue.

It wasn't like slapstick. It, there was reasons why that happened because I was making a wheel that needed string, but I just didn't have any normal string.

Zibby: Well, I feel like your brand of comedy and vulnerability and all of it. Has never been more needed than now, and I know people probably feel this all the time, but it is just the antidote to all of the stress of the world, which just continues to escalate. So I feel like people will cling to this forever because it is an escape that people so desperately need and has a unique way of getting us to where we need to be.

Helen: I mean that. Can you imagine what that means to a writer to hear that? Because I was, you know, I was a pretty struggling journalist when I wrote this and I'm living from check to check and so many books are published in the world, just so many books. And the idea that something I wrote is still being read is, is pretty amazing to me.

And, you know, I've got an 18 year old daughter and the fact that her friends are now reading it. And if I go to a book event that there's those. Gen Z's are there. In England they've got this frazzled English woman look, which they think is the Bridget Jones look. They have like messy hair and a scarf that doesn't match the hat.

But I just find that really, really moving that, that they're related to something that I wrote all that. Time will go. 

Zibby: I loved what you were saying about how this continues to appeal to different age groups. And as I was rereading it, I was like, Oh, this like completely holds up. I thought maybe, you know, what would this be like 25 years later?

And I've read it actually several times over the years, but it totally holds up. And all your new stuff at the end is hilarious. And then you think, well, of course people are still reading it. People are, this is going to sound so stupid. People are still people like we still have all the same needs emotionally.

And those are not something that expire with time. 

Helen: No, I mean, I think, I think the stuff that is quite shocking now is the, the workplace sexism. Right. You know, Mr. Tit's pervert. Right. Daniel. But that one's confusing because that, the Daniel thing is, is sort of reciprocal flirtation. And I don't know quite how you deal with that really.

Because They're both at it, you know, they're both doing it. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Helen: Not like he's hitting on her and she doesn't want him to. But Mr. T is pervert and all that stuff. When I re saw the film after years and years and years with my kids, I thought, what did I put up with? What, you know, when I was in my BBC, that I didn't realise I had to put up with, you know, like, it was just part and parcel that, you know, some boss would put his arm around you and it would, his hand would creep a bit too far and just this constant, constant.

stuff coming at you and we were just like, you know, it was just like something you had to navigate really. So thank goodness for me too. But I think looking back at that book, it's of its time in that sense that it was in the 90s and Bridget was just, I think I put at one point, she just had to accept that her boss was going to stare freely at her breasts and not know what her name was.

And her uncle was going to sort of say inappropriate things to her. She didn't at that point know. I mean, Mr. T is perver, or I think it was actually called Fitzherbert, would have been fired now for that behavior and those comments and things. But she didn't know. She was just navigating it as, as we all were, you know.

Zibby: Have you thought about, I mean, I think we're generally the same age. I don't know. I have 17 year old twins and I don't know. I would very much like a Bridget for Aging, and now, and all of this stuff, and I would love to read every day, like, a little snippet of what it's like for you navigating, because, okay, we don't have to deal with the things in our 20s and 30s anymore, but there are, of course, more things that happen now that are depressing, but need, need that humor, humorous touch.

Helen: Well, I did the book that's coming out as a film soon, Mad About the Boy. I did write about Bridget being a single mum and a widow and sort of rediscovering love as an older woman. And that book started not as a Bridget book, but just because that was a story I was starting to, that's, you know, you sort of get carried away by the fairies with, with writing fiction because I took a conscious decision after.

Bridget first came out not to be an annual author, like not to keep writing more and more Bridget books, but only to do it when a story I wanted to tell, or sometimes it's just a story that you start writing without even knowing why. And I think, you know, just as the first In the first Bridget, Bridget was dealing with this oppressive stereotype of a single woman in her 30s, who was still at that point slightly Miss Happisham, and there were sort of shells and cobwebs and spinning wheels and the fear of dying alone and being found three weeks later half eaten by an Alsatian hovering around, but that was a very outdated thing, and fiction is always very slow to catch up with reality, and That wasn't why me and my friends were single.

It was, it was because the world's changed. We have our own economic power and, you know, male, female dynamics have changed. And there were lots of reasons for being single. And I think that Bridget perhaps, I hope went some way towards changing perceptions on that so that Smug marriage. don't feel they can just walk up to someone and say, why aren't you married?

As if there's only one way to live. And I think that the, in Mad About The Boy, I was writing about the same sort of oppressive. stereotypes about the older woman. I mean, there's one point in that book where she, Bridget, sees a flyer for the older fifties club, over fifties club, and it's offering bingo nights and coach trips to the seaside and sort of granny things.

And she suddenly has this panicked looks in the mirror and she. grows a tight grey perm and a unibosom and a shopping trolley and she, she looks like her own bunny and she's like what am I now? What is my image at this age? And I think, again, the representation of older women in fiction is being slow to catch up with what Women in their late 40s, 50s, 60s are actually light.

They're still vibrant, they're still healthy. They don't have to be. There's no one way of aging. But what I see around me is not our image of a granny. It's fit, vibrant, sexy. women still living similar lives to before, but with more wisdom, with more understanding. And, you know, I think society will change all these expressions like, Oh, trout, Oh, biddy, or, you know, being bossy or a diva.

successful at work. I love the thing Beyonce says, I'm not bossy, I'm the boss. I think just to kind of own it, own what comes with being older, own, women are great multitaskers. I don't like to generalize about the sexes, but by, I think from what I see by our nature, we multitask, we have to juggle all these different aspects of our lives.

And so we know a lot and in the At the moment, as you say, it's a scary time. You know, there's, everyone's lived through the pandemic. There's climate change. You know, my daughter just narrowly escaped the LA fires. There's wars. There's, you know, all sorts of leadership issues all over the world. It is scary.

So if an older woman has the emotional intelligence to navigate Those things and to have navigated then that needs to be honored and older women need to be respected as they are in other cultures. And one of the things I love about the Gen Z's is they do. They're very un ageist, the Gen Z's. They want you around and they don't divide age groups that they hang with and they want to hear.

what we as older women know. And they also are very like Bridget in that they're emotionally vulnerable and prepared to be honest about that. And they have all these little soothing rituals. Whereas Bridget had a sort of vodka and ice cream. They have all these potions and keys and sleep rituals that they find on TikTok.

And little sort of beignets and face masks and things. But it's all the same thing of finding community and closeness. In the way that Bridget did with her friends. 

Zibby: You're absolutely right. I was reading a book recently, they were talking, it was about a younger woman in her twenties and an older woman who were off doing something.

And I read the whole thing with this image of who the older woman was in my head. And I was thinking kind of like 70 or something, like 60, I don't know, late 60s, 80s, I don't know. And then it came up later in the book and it was like. And then she was, you know, it said she was like 48. And I was like, what?

Like, 48? I was like, she's that old? Anyway. 

Helen: It's so, it's so hilarious. I find my children about to say about someone, uh, he's old. And then they sort of pop themselves. We'd probably like 35 or something, you know? 

Zibby: Well, just before we go, there's something so amazing about this unintentional success of yours that.

You try to be serious. And this is, of course, the Bridget phenomenon represented even with the book, right? That you tried to, you were trying to be so serious and well respected as a journalist. And the funny thing on the side is what ends up getting the wrong attention. 

So like, if you have advice, there's so many people out there, and it doesn't even have to be in the writing world, right?

It could be anything in which people are just striving and trying and trying to be perhaps something that they, they can do, but it's not the most authentic to them. Like, what do, where do we go from there? What should, what should everybody do? I know we can't all, you know, write Bridget Jones's diary, but there are ways in everyone's life that they can, Internalize your philosophy.

Helen: You mean in terms of work? 

Zibby: Work, yeah, in terms of work. 

Helen: Yeah, I think it's really interesting. It's interesting to me that that came from left of field. But it also followed a lot of years of just slugging it out as a journalist and a writer. And, like, my first novel was a sort of very cheap romance. Called Fires of Zanzibar and it was rejected by the publisher because neither my character nor my story was up to the high standards demanded by their reader.

So I'd gone through a lot of hoops, I'd gone through a lot of work and practice. So I think there's something about hard work that is effective in that you are practicing, you're, you are teaching yourself, and I think a lot of. students, teenagers come out of college thinking, Oh, I'm going to write a screenplay and it'll be made into a film.

And I always say, actually, really don't do that. Find your voice in small ways, really work and do it. However, whatever medium, YouTube, podcast, or if you're going to write a blog or write for a newspaper or an online thing, find your voice, find your humor, find what you want to say and learn how to do that, and then write a book.

Don't write a screenplay, write a book. Then you know what you mean, and so does everyone else. And you've created your characters, and your world, and you've made it work yourself. And then if it's good, someone will buy it. But I think generally sort of a sense of integrity and hard work is, is really important.

But at the same time, there's no point just straining. That's something that isn't giving you anything like if it, if it's not working, the ability to switch paths like water is so valuable and you suddenly find, you know, when you're in a flow, you know, when you, you found a path that's working. And if you listen to yourself, You know it's there, and you've got to have the tools, you've got to work, you've got to train yourself, but if you listen to what is actually making you happy and what's actually getting acceptance from other people and speaking to people, then, then you'll just know.

Do I sound like a hippie? 

Zibby: No, not at all. I love it. I love it. And I love your calling attention to, you know, putting in the hours and all the work behind it. And that. It's not just out of nowhere when things happen, right? There is a, a bedrock. 

Helen: There's a better and I think the more experience you have behind you when you do get a success, it's easier to deal with it because, you know, sometimes be careful what you wish for.

It's not always as we see from a lot of. sort of music industry stars, when they get sudden fame, that's incredibly difficult to deal with. So, and a lot of young people just want to be famous, but think about that too, because that is, it's like getting a disease once you're famous, that if you're visually famous, if people stop noticing you, then that's bad too, you know, you sort of, it's a real double edged sword.

So I think in answer to your original question, just Just have, there's a book that I really love called Women Who Run With the Wolves and it's about having the, one of the things in it, it's about women's sort of instinctive side and it talks about having the wolf's eyelash which is just that part of you that sees, that sees what's actually going on and I think Women are really good at that.

We've got great intuition. We need to listen to it and be sort of warriors and act on it when we act on what we see. God, I do sound like a hippie, don't I?

Zibby: I love it. Yes. I love it. She adds, she adds book to cart.

Oh, well, Helen, thank you so much. I am just honored you took the time to chat with me and I am such a fan and you know, this is such a cultural touchstone. And you are a role model in terms of just being who you are and putting it out there. And I love it. And thank you. Thank you so much. 

Helen: Oh, thank you so much.

It's been a really great conversation. 

Zibby: Thank you. Thank you. And I hope your daughter's right. 

Helen: I'll go run out into the woods with my bow and arrow now. 

Zibby: Yes. I'm going to go be a wolf. I'll be a wolf today. So thank you. Yes, exactly. All right. Have a great day. Thanks so much. Bye bye.