'It is a truth universally acknowledged,’ Bridget noted back in the mid-’90s, ‘that when one part of your life starts going really well, another falls spectacularly apart.'
When Bridget last ended a movie – Bridget Jones’s Baby – she seemed to have it all: a baby, a profession and a husband in the form of the Mark Darcy/Colin Firth/Mr Darcy hybrid (a delicious hybrid I have never wanted to separate into its parts).
But happy endings are all about where you choose to stop the story. In this new – now fourth – Bridget movie, Mad About The Boy (emotional for me and the cast after more than 20 years – who knew?) Bridget’s life has spectacularly fallen apart. Bridget is still the same Bridget/Renée (I can’t separate those two either) but is now a single parent. After four years holding it together alone, she is trying to really live again and rediscover her sexuality as a single older woman. And as she and her friends declare, the image of the older woman needs a serious re-brand.
Fiction – especially on screen – is slow to keep pace with social reality. Oppressive female stereotypes get stamped out and reappear like whack-a-mole.
I first wrote Bridget Jones as an anonymous newspaper column in 1995. That anonymity freed me up to be emotionally honest. Bridget, then, was fighting the outdated stereotype of the ‘desperate 30-something single woman’ with spectres of Miss Havisham, cobwebs, spinning wheels and fears of dying alone and being found three weeks later half-eaten by an Alsatian. ‘Why aren’t you married?’ Smug Marrieds would sneer, mimicking the ticking of a biological clock. For Bridget (and, it turned out, rather a lot of women) there were good social and economic reasons why they would be single in their thirties. Now, hopefully thanks in part to Bridget’s comedy, they can hold their heads and wine glasses high as Singletons, and reply to judgy Smug questions with, ‘How’s your marriage going – still having sex?
In Mad About The Boy, Bridget is dealing with another set of oppressive stereotypes – the Older Woman ones. We all know the euphemisms: ‘Women of a certain age’. The open insults: ‘old biddy, old trout, old bag. old bat’. For the sexual: ‘cougar’. For the professionally successful: ‘diva’, ‘ball-buster,’ ‘bossy’ (my favourite riposte to that one is Beyoncé’s, ‘I’m not bossy, I’m the boss.’)
At a crisis point in the novel Bridget sees a flyer for an ‘Over Fifties Club’ offering ‘Bingo nights! Seaside coach trips! Tea dances!’ In her mind she instantly acquires a tight grey perm, a uni-bosom and a shopping trolley. How is she supposed to see herself as a 50-plus woman? It gets to you: no matter how much time you spend thinking about Jennifer Aniston, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Jane Fonda.
There is room for every style of womanhood at any age. But Bridget is not rolling over into being anyone’s ‘old biddy’. (Even if her small daughter does ask, ‘Mummy, were you born in Renaissance times? Or the Victorian era?’ And said daughter’s friend inquires on the school run, ‘Why is your granny wearing pyjamas?’)
The myth of the sexual sell-by date imbalance still gallops through the glen, encouraged by Hollywood with its endless older man/younger woman romances and sexist nonsense. But it’s getting better and shifts in Hollywood’s portrayals and behaviour help perceptions somewhat, but it all goes way deeper.
In Mad About The Boy, the Smug Marrieds are still at it: ‘Still no man, Bridget? Much harder for single women of a certain age than men. When Rosemary died Binko Carruthers was inundated with women, throwing themselves at him.’
Yes, Bridget is now a widow. When I published the Mad About The Boy novel, ‘Mark Darcy is DEAD’ was a BBC news headline. A bloke ran out of the pub yelling at me, ‘You’ve murdered Colin Firth!’ I tried to explain that Mark Darcy wasn’t a real person and Colin Firth was still alive (even though I had to call Colin and ask if he ‘had someone with him’ before I broke it to him. I think he may just about have forgiven me).
But life has its white notes and life has its black notes. The husband/father loss is just what happened in that story in my head. Mad About The Boy didn’t even start as a Bridget novel – it just turned into one. After Bridget Jones’s Diary became a surprise bestseller I could have churned one out regularly. But I’m very protective of Bridget and grateful to her. I would only write a story for her if there is something to say.
So! Back to bloody Binko Carruthers. Is this peddled myth that women pass their sexual sell-by date earlier than men – that widowed older women can’t find partners and men can – actually based in reality?
I’m no sociologist, but women do confide in me, probably because I wrote Bridget. A lot of widowed or divorced women, who’ve spent their lives taking care of husbands, children and ageing parents, don’t actually want to take on someone else to look after. They’re enjoying their freedom and, yes, the chance to quietly ‘take a lover’ if they fancy. Women in their fifties and above don’t stop being the same person, doing the same things, wearing the same things, keeping fit, having the same friends and fun.
It’s not about using beauty techniques to keep looking young (though, excuse me, what exactly is wrong with that?). It’s about culture showing a new, proper respect for the wisdom, compassion, multitasking kindness, warmth, badass capability and, yes, sexiness that comes through years of surfing the ups and downs of a woman’s longer life.
So back yet again to the Smugs and their ‘poor, poor redundant older women’. Stuff that. In the movie of Mad About The Boy, Bridget – spoiler alert – gets to shag Leo Woodall (Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Leo Woodall, Chiwetel Ejiofor – you’re welcome, RZ! Though, as you know, I have NOT forgiven you for stopping me being your sex-scene stand-in) AND have a job and kids. And trust me, I started as a journalist and the best advice I had for writing was write about what you know.
As a writer you can’t control the outcome of a movie, you are just one voice in a huge machine. In the novel, Bridget’s relationship with Roxster, her much younger man, is a true meeting of kindred spirits in the jungle of the dating world. ‘I don’t like the word “cougar”,’ Roxster says. ‘It implies the huntress rather than the hunted.’ When he gets uncertain – saying, ‘I wish I had a time machine’ – Bridget has the wisdom to say no, with affection and grace and move on herself, too.
One of the many reasons I love Renée playing Bridget is that she can look both a total mess and really good. (As I hope I might in these pictures. OMG the treat of spending years mad-haired and feral at a laptop then being all done up for a photo shoot.) Bridget’s men don’t fall for her because she looks young and perfect. It’s her spirit and joie de vivre they fall for: the perfection of her imperfections.
Bridget keeps her old friends and finds new ones, watching the course of their lives unfold. Hugh Grant/Daniel Cleaver is brilliant and funny in the film. (Hugh is v loyal and collaborative. I joke immaturely about writing him a small role and offering to help ‘enlarge his part’.)
There is no single right life-course for Bridget’s friends, or any woman: married, single, have children, don’t have children, try to be a perfect mother, threaten to sell the little f***ers to a circus – no one’s life is perfect once you crack the shell. Older women need to be honoured, not judged with intrusive questions that people would never ask a man. A successful journalist friend of mine said she’s constantly asked why she doesn’t have children – not so with her child-free male colleagues.
Mad About The Boy is not, at heart, about finding a man. (Although why shouldn’t a story stop at a happy moment? We all need a bit of cheer. Since the last movie everybody has lived through major black notes, seeing the world fall apart in the pandemic, living in a dangerous, divisive time on a fragile planet. People are struggling.) This movie was written about resilience and community: the emotional honesty to share, laugh, cry and support each other when stuff goes wrong, which helps everyone through.
Humour is an effective way of processing life. When solemn commentators complain about Bridget Jones, I think, don’t look at Bridget, look instead at the reaction to Bridget and why you’re still talking about her. If we as women can’t be honest and laugh together at our imperfections, oppressive stereotypes and struggles, we haven’t got very far at being equal, have we?
‘Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy’ is in cinemas from 14 February; a new edition of the paperback is available now
TOP IMAGE: Photographer: Sophia Spring. Stylist: Kate Sinclair. Hair: Lewis Pallett at Eighteen Management using ghd. Makeup: Liz Pugh at Premier. Photographer Assistant: Valentina Concordia, Stylist Assistant: Anna Kobayashi.
Helen wears: (left) coat, Bottega Veneta; shoes, Sauvereign; earrings, Astley Clarke (right) faux-fur coat, Isabel Marant