Such high hopes for this one. I picked up the Helen Fielding phenomenon at the library last week (because that's a practical, exemplary and safe low-budget thing to do), thinking to myself that I'd really like to write a funny book that would become a funny movie and cast myself in it and just sit back and watch all my dreams come true. These are the ways I spend my days, for all curious. So I thought, again to myself, that perhaps it would behoove me to pick up a book that I wished I'd written that prompted a movie that I would have liked to be cast in. Enter Bridget, of course.
To preface, I thought this was one of the most perfect movies ever. It was superbly acted, hysterically funny, and made me feel better about my weight obsession, because, as the famous saying goes, weight obsession shared is weight obsession divided. Everyone knows a Bridget, loves her, pities her, exists as her in some small corner of their own life. I bloody well do. It was charming and poignant and exaggeratedly accurate.
And the book was... sort of those things. It's written as a diary (duh) so it's quick to read, full of shortcuts and abbreviations and observations that no one other than Bridget herself would actually say out loud. It's funny, but it doesn't pack the punch that the movie did. After a while, the shtick of the diary concept grows a little weary and what you're left with is a lot of clever turns of phrase and not much by way of an actual story. There's none of the drama of the Jones-Daniel-Darcy love triangle that is really the driving force of the film (although, funnily enough, both Hugh Grant and Colin Firth are mentioned in the book.) Her neuroticism is still sweet and lovable and laughable, but there never seems to be a point to it. Not that I need my grown-up stories to tie neatly together into some clear cut purpose with an Aesop ending, but when I'm several hundred pages in, even if I'm being entertained, I'd like there to be even the most trite of reasons for me to be there, to be reading along. (Ironic, I know, as the author of a blog entitled Note To Self which covers absolutely nothing of any significance, hardly ever. I'm working on it. And I'm not asking you to pay for it, either. Although this was a library book so technically I didn't pay for this book. Shit, and now I'm off point. I mean bollocks, now I'm off point.)
So, read it if you need something to make you laugh and not think at all and plan on zoning out for several paragraphs or pages at a time but want to still understand what's going on. Great beach book. Train book. Starts out strong, fizzles a bit, but if you love Bridget like I do, darlings, you'll be happy just to spend a little more time with her.
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