How Did I Miss This?

You might have guessed from my previous post, in which I quoted an entire paragraph from "Bridget Jones's Diary," that I am a bit of a fan. Not an ironic, so-bad-it's-good fan, either - I really love that book.

I happened to be visiting in England when the original columns were first running, and I think that has something to do with my devotion. She didn't come across as such a scatterbrained, man-obsessed ninny in that incarnation, more a girl-about-town who couldn't quite keep her life together.

This probably had a lot to do with the gorgeous silhouette that ran with the column. (From the article linked above: "If Bridget Jones became an icon, that undeniably sexy, evocative, silhouette - a half-filled glass, a stray lock of hair and a swirl of cigarette smoke - became the image that helped define the icon.") The picture was used as the cover of U.K. editions of the book but replaced by those wigged-out eyes on U.S. editions, and later, of course, by the befuddled visage of Renee Zellweger. I also think the way the columns were edited to streamline the plot for the first book stripped out a lot of the material that made Bridget seem more real.

Anyway, I was so hungry for another installment that I even went to the trouble of digging up all those old columns online, pasting them into a Word document, and reading them again. I had plans to make some kind of booklet for friends (not for sale or profit, scary literary lawyer police!), but got bogged down in endless Virgoesque copyediting. (Lots of weird typos in those scanned free-article databases.)

So how could it be that just as I was slavishly copy-and-pasting those tired old columns into my sad Word doc, a whole new series was being freshly produced in the London Independent, and I knew nothing of it? How could some news of this development not come my way? Bridget, knocked up by one of her exes, and I don't hear about it until six months after the baby has been fictitiously birthed?

Thankfully, there are plenty of other weird Bridget fans out there. If you're one of them, and of the ill-informed variety like me, you can find all the new articles lovingly assembled here. Or come over to my house, and I'll let you read the new Word document I just put together ...