Keeping up with the Jones

Helen Fielding (HF): It is a while since I last wrote a Bridget book. Bridget is a character who I’m really fond of and she means a lot to me. It was a choice between either keeping on doing the same thing or waiting until I had something different to say. And that’s what I did. I have the note in my diary from March 2012: ‘I wonder if I could write a book about … ‘ and it wasn’t initially about Bridget. And then the voice became Bridget’s voice.

What was nice about writing it was that, as with the first book, nobody was the slightest bit interested in it because I hadn’t told anybody. I could write on my laptop, in my usual armchair, without wondering what anyone else would think about it. It freed me up to say what I wanted to say and tell the story I wanted to tell.

What’s changed in Bridget’s life over the past decade?

HF: Bridget is quite a lot older now. The world has completely changed since I wrote the first book. Then, there was no texting and there were no e-mails. Some of the things I found particularly funny and intriguing while I was writing the new book were to do with technology. Bridget now lives her life through texting.

She has her own set of rules about it, the number one rule being ‘do not text when drunk’. I was interested in exploring little things like that, which I suppose I was struggling with. Like the ‘cyber circle’, where you log on to answer an e-mail and then you suddenly see a story on Yahoo, and then you google some holidays, and then you look at boys on a dating site, and then kettles at John Lewis, and then go and look at dresses. And then you get sad because you put a dress in your basket and it didn’t wink back at you. And then, hours have gone by and you realise you didn’t answer the e-mail you logged on to reply to in the first place.

Another thing I find curious about the modern world is how everyone is just too busy. It’s almost as if people’s brains have too many computer pages open. There’s all this communication from texting and e-mails and Twitter and WhatsApp and Instagram – and just so many different things going on at once. People have got really overstuffed lives. Bridget, of course, deals with it by reading one of her self-help books, which tells her to divide the day up into four quadrants of jobs: important and urgent; important not urgent; not important and urgent; not important and not urgent.

So she gets all her mad jobs – respond to zombie apocalypse invitation; find phone; lose 10 pounds; respond to Cosmata’s Build-a-Bear Party invitation; blow up bike – and then puts them into the quadrants. I think a lot of people are battling with the same thing, we’re all just too busy.

On the front cover of the new book Mad About The Boy, there are toys by Bridget’s high heels.

HF: Bridget is now a mother and parenthood becomes another of those things that she thinks she’s meant to be really good at, but that she thinks she’s really bad at. So she reads a lot of parenting books including 1, 2, 3 Happy Parenting and French Children Don’t Throw Food. All that happens with the latter is that she keeps shouting ‘Attends!’ at the children and they ignore her. She does sometimes forget them and leave them on the pavement and she does sometimes worry that they’ll be taken into care by social services, but essentially she loves them.

A difficulty with modern parenting is that women often have children later, once they’ve enjoyed a career. Women can control things in their career, but you can’t control children! It’s almost as if the bar’s set too high and there’s this carousel of going from parties to play-dates to computer games to fencing lessons. I think Bridget gives a sense that it’s not really about that. It’s about being with them and loving them and muddling through like everything else.