Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy
Helen Fielding
ABOUT THE BOOK
WHAT DO YOU DO when a girlfriend’s 60th birthday party is the same day as your boyfriend’s 30th?
IS IT WRONG to lie about your age when online dating?
IS IT MORALLY WRONG to have a blow-dry when one of your children has head lice?
DOES THE DALAI LAMA actually tweet or is it his assistant?
IS TECHNOLOGY now the fifth element? Or is that wood?
IS SLEEPING WITH SOMEONE after 2 dates and 6 weeks of texting the same as getting married after 2 meetings and 6 months of letter writing in Jane Austen’s day?
Pondering these, and other modern dilemmas, Bridget Jones stumbles through the challenges of single-motherhood, tweeting, texting and rediscovering her sexuality in what SOME people rudely and outdatedly call ‘middle age’.
The long-awaited return of a much-loved character, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is timely, tender, touching, witty, wise and bloody hilarious.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
HELEN FIELDING is the author of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and was part of the screenwriting team on the films of the same name. Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is her fifth novel. She has two children and lives in London and sometimes Los Angeles.
PROLOGUE
Thursday 18 April 2013
2.30 p.m. Talitha just called, talking in that urgent, ‘let’s-be-discreet-but-wildly-overdramatic’ voice she always has. ‘Darling, I just want to let you know that it’s my sixtieth on the 24th of May. I’m not SAYING it’s my sixtieth, obviously. And keep it quiet because I’m not asking everyone. I just wanted you to keep the date free.’
I panicked. ‘That would be great!’ I gushed unconvincingly.
‘Bridget. You absolutely can’t not come.’
‘Well, the thing is . . .’
‘What?’
‘It’s Roxster’s thirtieth birthday that night.’
Silence at the end of the phone.
‘I mean, we probably won’t still be together by then, but, if we are, it would be . . .’ I tailed off.
‘I’ve just put “no children” on the invites.’
‘He’ll be thirty by then!’ I said indignantly.
‘I’m just teasing, darling. Of course you must bring your toy boy. I’ll get a bouncy castle! Back on air. Mustrunloveyoubye!’
Tried to turn on telly to see if Talitha had indeed, as so often, been calling me live on air during a film clip. Jabbed confusedly at buttons like a monkey with a mobile phone. Why does turning on a TV these days require three remotes with ninety buttons? Why? Suspect designed by thirteen-year-old technogeeks, competing with each other from sordid bedrooms, leaving everyone else thinking they’re the only person in the world who doesn’t understand what the buttons are for, thus wreaking psychological damage on a massive, global scale.
Threw remotes petulantly onto sofa, at which TV randomly burst into life, showing Talitha looking immaculate, one leg sexily crossed over the other, interviewing the dark-haired Liverpool footballer who has the anger-management/biting problem. He looked as if he wanted to bite Talitha, though for rather different reasons than on the pitch.
Right. No need for panic – will simply assess pros and cons of Roxster/Talitha party issue in calm and mature manner:
PROS OF TAKING ROXSTER TO PARTY
*It would be terrible not to go to Talitha’s. She has been my friend since our Sit Up Britain days, when she was an impossibly glamorous newsreader and I was an impossibly incompetent reporter.
*It would be quite funny to take Roxster, and also smug-making, because the thirtieth/sixtieth birthday thing would stop all that patronizing pitying-of-single-women-‘of-a-certain-age’ thing, like they’re terminally stuck with their singleness, whereas single men of that age are snapped up before they’ve had time to draw up the divorce papers. And Roxster is so gorgeous and peach-like, thereby somehow denying reality of ageing process on self.
CONS OF TAKING ROXSTER TO PARTY
*Roxster is his own man, and would doubtless take exception to being treated as some sort of comedy, or anti-ageing device.
*Crucially, it might put Roxster off me, to be surrounded by old people at sixtieth birthday party, and make some sort of completely unnecessary point about how old I am though of course am MUCH younger than Talitha. And frankly, I refuse to believe how old I actually am. As Oscar Wilde says, thirty-five is the perfect age for a woman, so much so that many women have decided to adopt it for the rest of their lives.
*Roxster is probably having his own party with young people squeezed onto his balcony, barbecuing and listening to 70s disco music with ironic ‘retro’ amusement, and is thinking at this moment how to avoid asking me to the party in case his friends find out he is going out with a woman literally old enough to be his mother. Actually, possibly, technically, with the advancement of puberty due to hormones in milk these days – grandmother. Oh God. Why did mind think such a thought?
3.10 p.m. Gaaah! Have got to pick up Mabel in twenty minutes and have not got rice cakes ready. Gaah. Telephone.
‘I have Brian Katzenberg for you.’
My new agent! Actual agent. But I would be BEYOND late for Mabel if I stopped and talked.
‘Can I call Brian back later?’ I trilled, trying to smear pretend-butter onto the rice cakes, stick them together and put them in a Ziploc with one hand.