Helen Fielding

Start with the Times, right at the top, plugging stuff further inside the newspapers.

Are you a Dalai Lama dresser like Helen Fielding? Do you know what? I understand so little of that.

I'm just going to say no and then move on.

Who cares if any of that...

Which Love As Well, which is from news articles.

So there was a, what's it called? Yes, Helen Fielding.

She had a newspaper column about Bridget Jones.

So it's loosely based on Pride and Prejudice and they would do it every week, you know, her Bridget Jones's diary.

But what's fascinating here is the underlying psychology.

Helen Fielding understood something essential about the modern rom-com heroine

What's that?

That she can be incredibly foolish, she can make terrible self-destructive decisions without ever being disposable

The director, Sharon Maguire, was the real-life inspiration for the character of Shazza.

Her friend, Helen Fielding's name, also appears in one of the acknowledgement pages of the book.

Oh, shit.

Okay.

I have been really curious to read something by Jennifer Egan ever since I went, um, I think last year was the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth, and I went to a program here at the 92nd Street Y about her novels and celebrating her work.

And the three authors they had invited to talk about her work and how they've been inspired by her writing were Kevin Kwan, Helen Fielding, who wrote Bridget Jones's Diary, and Jennifer Egan.

Mm.

And so Kevin Kwan made sense to me 'cause he writes these kind of, like, society rom-com gossipy books, and then obviously Bridget Jones's Diary is a retelling of Pride and Prejudice.