I haven’t been looked at, in real life, for a long time. We’re talking months. This all changed on Wednesday when I was filmed in Herne Hill Books, my local bookshop in south London, for a documentary on Bridget Jones’s Diary. That day, I was being looked at by two masked men (producers) and two cameras for the best part of two hours. I was also stared at by the people of Herne Hill when the masked men asked me to walk up and down the street pretending to enter the bookshop. It was really quite something.
My novel, Queenie, has been called the “Black Bridget Jones”, so it makes sense that I’d be part of a 25th-anniversary celebration. I was asked some interesting and important questions about Bridget and her diaries, some that allowed me to be critical – about Bridget’s feminism, weight and body shaming, about money, privilege and class, and certainly around representation. It’s astonishing that Bridget didn’t have one black friend or colleague.
Talking about what the book meant to me reminded me how important Bridget Jones was both to me as a woman and to my writing. Shout out to Helen Fielding for creating a blueprint for female characters that are just trying to make it through the day without doing anything too embarrassing. Like walking down the street pretending to be going into a bookshop.
