Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding

This was a re-read to see if it still held up as the hilarious paragon of satire that I remember.

And it did.

I thought that some of the referenced felt so dated that they were hard to relate to now, but the bulk of it held up and brought the same amount of "this is ridiculous" incredulity to me.

Bridget is every insecurity thrust on women in one neurotic ball, and though it feels wrong to laugh at her, it is fun to chuckle with Helen Fielding at the outrageous demands of the world, placed on women to mold themselves to a standard arbitrarily set for them by men.

This book is a Pride and Prejudice retelling, so the part that blows me away, again and again, is that despite hundreds of years of seeming progress, the premise of needing a man to be valid in this society, remains the same.

It is maddening and eye-opening to read that kind of commentary, really see it in perspective, and check-in with ourselves on whether 20+ years since publication, if it is still true today. - Sky

————

This was a re-read for me, as well, and it was hard to not get upset at the bits that have clearly been dated by the passage of 20 years. In conjunction with reading, I re-watched the movie and my spouse joined me. It was his first time seeing it and his reaction was, “there are no nice characters.” Everyone is kinda a shit, in the book and in the movie.

The book did not age well as every character is, at least, one of the following: sizeist, sexist, homophobic, shadenfreudeist, misogynist, or insulting.

Bridget herself is a mirror to every woman because she contains every single insecurity a woman could have and she never overcomes any of them. She wavers between popular diets/concepts, self-control, fuck it attitude, and self-reclamation and none of them stick. She just lets things happen to her and anything she attempts on her own she fails at. If she’s a satire of the 90s-2000s modern woman: then that’s an insult. -Ford