'Reflecting life as you see it'

 

“I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.” – Helen Fielding

An English novelist and screenwriter, Fielding is best known as the creator of the character Bridget Jones and her novels and films about the the life of this 30-something Londener trying to make sense of life and love.

Written in the 1990s Bridget Jones's Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason sold multi-millions  and spawned two award-winning films of the same name.  Her 2016 book Bridget Jone's Baby: The Diaries also had great success.  A survey conducted by The Guardian newspaper, Bridget Jones’s Diary was named as one of the ten novels that best defined the 20th century.

Born on this date in 1958, Fielding gravitated to writing at an early age and became a journalist right out of college, first working for the BBC and then as a journalist and columnist for several major British newspapers. 

                         

She actually wrote Bridget Jones’s Diary as a weekly "serial" column in the London newspaper The Independent, much in the way that you might make entries in a journal or diary.  Eventually she had both a great following of readers and the chapters of her book.

Fielding credits Bridget’s success to the fact that, at heart,  the story is about “the gap between how we feel we are expected to be and how we actually are.”  And, of course, she says her use of humor made it even more popular.  “Comedy tends to come out of things which are quite painful and serious.”