Bridget Jones Deserved Better. We All Did.
Helen Fielding’s ditzy heroine was all the rage when she was introduced to American audiences in 1998. Today, her nuttiness and self-loathing read like a relic from another time.
By Elisabeth Egan
Before we tackle the question of whether “Bridget Jones’s Diary” is even remotely amusing in today’s post-Roe, #MeToo, politically polarized world, let’s turn the page back to the summer of 1998, when Publishers Weekly declared, “It’s hard to imagine a funnier book appearing anywhere this year.” Fielding’s British publisher told British Vogue, it’s “not just a book phenomenon, it’s a phenomenon. Like ‘Catch-22,’ it’s gone into the language.”
In her New York Times review, Elizabeth Gleick wrote, “People will be passing around copies of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ for a reason: It captures neatly the way modern women teeter between ‘I am woman’ independence and a pathetic girlie desire to be all things to all men.”...
She was the toast of book clubs, the subject of editorials, a lightning rod for morning-show debate and fodder for late-night comedy. Some readers were charmed by Bridget Jones; others were disgusted.
“Bridget is such a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness, that her foolishness cannot be excused,” Alex Kuczynski wrote in a Times column headlined “Dear Diary: Get Real.” She disliked that the book made “humor out of the premise that being neurotic is cute. That women eat too much. That we succumb to the lure of too many cocktails. That if we don’t enjoy our jobs, we just stick around and, heck, sleep with the boss (who never calls us back).”
For the whole article:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/books/review/bridget-joness-diary-helen-fielding.html