Book Review: Bridget Jones's Diary

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Bridget Jones’s Diary

Author: Helen Fielding

Date: 1996

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 0-14-02-8009-X

Length: 271 pages

Quote: “I WILL NOT...Sulk about having no boyfriend, but develop  inner poise and authority and sense of self as woman of substance, complete without boyfriend, as best way to obtain boyfriend.”

So of course poor Bridget, lacking real interests other than sex, spends the year obsessed with sex. Her New Year’s resolutions also include giving up cigarettes and limiting her use of alcohol. She doesn’t succeed at those things either. 

Bridget Jones became a successful series and a movie hit, but this web site has to tell the painful truth. When this novel came out, it invited comparison with other diary-style novels, notably The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole and (by the time it reached the U.S.) Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber. Both of those diaries were seriously, coffee-spewingly, can't-read-them-aloud-to-people-who-ask-what's-so-funny, funny. Adrian and Katya had so little in common their creators probably at least imagined them in some sort of short-term romance together, but the combination of their predictable comments on what each character believably noticed and thought, and their equally predictable blindness to their own contributions to the chronic chaos of their lives, made each of their stories an absolute scream.

In Bridget Jones, by contrast, although there are traces of wit (characters occasionally crack jokes), the primary "joke" consists of Bridget's confessions of lack of self-control, how many calories, how many "alcohol units," how many cigarettes, how many times she throws herself at the guy who's obviously satisfied his curiosity about her and begun looking for a way of escape. Bridget apparently completed some sort of education, somehow or somewhere, but she's a bimbo: she never thinks about anything but sex and self.

If you are or live in fear of being a self-and-sex-obsessed young person who can relate to people only as long as they’re exploring your body in the hope that you have a mind and a life somewhere, and you don’t, then you too may want to laugh at Bridget Jones. Or if you have the misfortune to have to work with such a person, then laughing at Bridget Jones might offer some relief. Or if you are a serious feminist and want to discuss the issues of bimbo-ism, real and perceived, with your consciousness-raising group, then Bridget Jones is an excellent fictional example.

Personally, I’m glad and grateful that even my severely nerve-damaged, almost deaf, borderline-disabled young relative has sooo much more going on in her mind than Bridget Jones.

To enter the dreary little world of a (thank goodness she's only fictional) bimbo, send $5 per book and $5 per package to the Boxholder at P.O. Box 322, or the same plus $1 for online payment to the Paypal address you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi, at the addresses at the very bottom of the screen. For each book, we'll send $1 to Fielding or a charity of her choice. There are now four volumes of Bridget Jones' adventures, which is also, conveniently, the number of books that fit into one $5 package; if you order the four books about Bridget Jones from this web site, Fielding or her charity get $4.