Summary
Bridget is in a state of disintegration, having left Daniel’s without a word and gone straight to Tom’s to drink. Daniel has left her messages, but Bridget is following Tom’s advice not to speak to him. Bridget is barely eating and is smoking heavily. She vows to start an intensive detoxification program with no indulgence of vices and a concerted effort to reduce the cellulite on her thighs. Soon she realizes the self-reinvention would only be to make Daniel regret his error.
After days spent ignoring Daniel, Bridget agrees to go for a drink with him at the Savory. He pleads and tells her he misses her, but as soon as she tells him she misses him too, he suddenly becomes “patronizing and businesslike.” He says he and Suki have something very special. As he pays for the drinks, he tells Bridget he is sorry, but he is marrying Suki.
Bridget realizes it was a terrible idea to have an affair with her boss. News of his engagement travels, and people at work call to congratulate Bridget. She has to explain he is marrying someone else. Failing to stop smoking, Bridget spirals into self-pity. She calls an ex, Peter, only to learn that he is engaged. Bridget goes to an art show with Tom, embarrassing herself in front of Daniel when she mistakes an art installation for the toilets. She sees Mark’s face on the cover of a magazine—it is a story about “how rich and marvelous” he is as one of London’s most eligible bachelors.
Bridget’s mother sets up an interview for Bridget to work in the TV industry. Confused by her interview date being rescheduled, Bridget is eventually included in Richard Finch’s consulting meeting. He asks how someone like Hugh Grant gets away with cheating on Elizabeth Hurley with a roadside sex worker? Bridget says someone must have swallowed the evidence. Finch laughs, seeming to like Bridget, but she leaves unsure whether she is being hired.
At the end of August, Bridget decides at the last minute to join her colleagues in Edinburgh for the Fringe Festival. Her mother is there interviewing people for Suddenly Single. Bridget spends the nights watching TV in the flat Perpetua has rented and doesn’t attend any shows, to her relief. She is surprised to learn she has to pay a share of the rent, having believed it was covered. Perpetua mistakenly believes Bridget had a man staying overnight, and says she’ll make sure the news gets back to Daniel to teach him a lesson.
Bridget is offered a job on Good Afternoon! She knows nothing about TV, but gives her notice to Daniel. He tells her she can’t do this to him, and that she knows how busy it has been lately. Perpetua bursts in the office, having eavesdropped through the door, and calls Daniel a selfish emotional blackmailer who “chucked her.” Despite always having disliked Perpetua, Bridget comments that she thinks she “might love” her.
Bridget starts her new job in September. On her first day, she overhears two young colleagues talking in the bathroom about the “bitchy thirtysomethings.” Bridget doesn’t know if she’ll be able to hang on in the job. Bridget goes to a dinner with “Smug Marrieds” and is annoyed to hear one of the men telling a 37-year-old divorced man that younger women find older men attractive. Bridget lies about having a 23-year-old boyfriend herself; they tell her to bring him to their next dinner.
Tom sets her up with his younger friend Gav, who Bridget met at the Saatchi Gallery. She is impressed by his ability to skirt around the Smug Marrieds questions and finds him attractive. He asks her over for dinner and so they go on another date. After eating they kiss and begin to undress. However, Bridget can’t go through with sex after he says, “Mmm. You’re all squashy.” She concludes that she is too old.
Bridget’s father phones about the “horror event” that is Mark’s parents' ruby wedding celebration, hosted by Mark at his newly renovated London home. Bridget doesn’t want to attend, but her father sobs and says he needs to go so that his and Bridget’s mother’s friends don’t write him off as history while celebrating her new relationship with Julio. Reluctantly, Bridget agrees to go too, so her father can have “moral support.”
Bridget thinks things are going well at work, but her first on-camera appearance ends disastrously when she slides down a fire pole too early and then the cameras cut away from her before she has a chance to interview the Lewisham fireman. In the office, her boss humiliates her in front of the other colleagues, who joke about how she only had time to say, “And now back to the studio.” Bridget concludes she is no good at anything.
Analysis
Bridget reacts to her disappointment with Daniel by endeavoring once again to reduce the cellulite on her thighs—a subcutaneous fat that causes dimpling of the skin and that between eighty and ninety percent of women have. However, in an instance of situational irony, Bridget reflects that she would only be pursuing such restrictive dietary habits and throwing money away on dubious anti-cellulite products so she could prove a point to Daniel. In this way, he still has a hold on her psychologically, and she wishes to forget him completely.
Bridget eventually stops ignoring Daniel and accepts on offer to meet him for a drink. In a moment of weakness, she admits that she misses him, but only after he says it first. Building on his emotional immaturity, Daniel’s demeanor changes immediately: just as he withdrew his offer of taking Bridget to Prague when she accepted, Daniel cancels out his would-be vulnerable emotional gesture by telling Bridget he is engaged to Suki, the woman on the roof. In this instance of situational irony, Daniel undermines Bridget’s expectations and reminds her why engaging with him only leads to further heartbreak.
Single again, Bridget wallows in self-pity, reaching desperately for companionship by phoning an ex only to learn that, naturally, he is engaged. To make things worse, Mark is featured in a magazine about the city’s most eligible bachelors. Fielding uses visual imagery to describe how Mark’s eyes stare in an attractive, smoldering way out of the magazine page at Bridget. In another instance of situational irony, she had assumed at the Turkey Curry Buffet that Mark’s v-neck sweater and bumble bee–pattern socks meant he was a bore, but here he is modeling for a magazine that celebrates how wealthy, respectable, and unmarried he is.
The humiliation of having dated and been dumped by her boss sends Bridget looking for other work. During her television program job interview, Bridget encounters a crass, overbearing stereotype of a TV producer in Richard Finch. However, she impresses him with a crude joke about the real-life scandal story in which the British actor Hugh Grant (who ironically later played Daniel in the film adaptation) was caught receiving oral sex from a sex worker on the side of a highway.
The pressures of being single arises again as a theme when Bridget lies during a dinner party with her Smug Married friends about having a young boyfriend. In an instance of situational irony, Bridget’s friend Tom happens to have already introduced her to a young guy who expressed interest in Bridget. In an instance of dramatic irony, Bridget and Gav successfully pose as a couple at another Smug Married dinner. Bridget develops a genuine attraction to him, but cuts it off when he describes her as “squashy,” unwittingly offending her by using a childish term to praise the body fat she is constantly fretting over.
