Summary
Bridget begins March concluding there is no point tracking her weight and consumption habits because she is exactly the same weight she was at the beginning of February despite having dieted the whole month. Bridget is astounded when her mother drops by to leave shopping bags at her flat and explains she is having a coffee date with a man she spoke to at the tax office when she called for help. She says that just because she and Julio (the more exotic-sounding nickname they have given Julian) are friends doesn’t mean she can’t have other friends. Bridget is upset when Daniel doesn’t make a plan with her the first weekend in March, so she gets drunk with her friend Sharon (Shazzer). Bridget continues to speak to both her parents, realizing that suddenly she is looking after them instead of them looking after her.
Acting on her friend Tom’s advice, Bridget ignores Daniel’s messages at work. Eventually Daniel comes over to her desk and asks why she’s ignoring him, making Bridget giddy, but she maintains the act. Tom phones her to say she must repeat the mantra, “Aloof, unavailable ice-queen,” if feeling weak. Bridget begins weighing herself again and is shocked by having gained several pounds. She records what she eats in a day, and sees her diet is full of carbs and sugar that she justifies by picking and choosing from various diets. One day Daniel invites Bridget on a weekend trip to Prague; she says yes, forgetting her ice-queen routine, and then at lunch the same day he cancels the plan, apologizing. She asks if he made the invite just to see if she would still sleep with him, then calls him out for emotional fuckwittage, saying she made it clear he has to treat her nicely. He gets cross with her about switching between icy and flirty.
Bridget frets over what to do for her birthday, and winds up inviting close friends over to make them dinner. However, people want to invite their partners, and other friends find out about the plan, so the guest list grows out of control. Bridget’s mother drops by to announce she got a job as a television presenter. On the 21st, Bridget’s birthday, she imagines she will impress everyone with her ability to serve a shepherd’s pie with fancy side dishes. In reality, she panics, running out of time as she scrambles to prepare everything; when the doorbell rings at 7:45, she wants tell her friends to fuck off. She is relieved when Magda reveals they had a feeling the dinner wouldn’t work out, so she booked a table at a restaurant and everyone is waiting there. Bridget says she loves her friends and vows to be less neurotic this year.
In April, Bridget intends to maintain “inner poise,” and tries to quit drinking and smoking. She also refrains from engaging with Daniel in any flirtatious way. Her dad phones to tell her to switch on BBC1: in horror, Bridget watches her mother being introduced on the Anne and Nick Show as the host of a new program, “Suddenly Single,” in which Bridget’s mother Pam Jones interviews people who find themself single late in life. While out one night, Bridget spots Jeremy, Magda’s husband, with an attractive young woman at another table. Bridget suspects he may be cheating, but gives him the benefit of the doubt and assumes it is a business meeting. At a launch party for Kafka’s Motorcycle, Bridget meets Mark Darcy again. His date, Natasha, gets into a heated debate about culture, which Bridget separates herself from. As she is leaving, Daniel grabs her waist and tries to seduce her while disparaging Mark, who he went to Cambridge with, as a nerd. Bridget is surprised when she firmly tells him no, despite thinking, “Shag me! Shag me!”
On April 22 Bridget weighs herself at 8st 7, confused to suddenly be thin despite eating normally. Tom asks if she is in love; she realizes she is actually free, no longer in love with Daniel. On the 25th she attends a party at Jude’s and is disappointed when her friends comment on how she looks. Despite having lost seven pounds, she appears to her friends as tired. Later that night Tom phones and tells her he thinks she looked better before. She laments that eighteen years of trying to get thin has resulted in her looking “tired and flat.”
One night Magda shows up outside Bridget’s in distress, saying Jeremy is having an affair. Her car alarm won’t stop going off, so she calls Jeremy and yells at him about how to turn it off. Meanwhile, Bridget’s bath, which she left running, overflows and leaks into the flat below hers. She realizes that she locked herself out. Her Australian neighbor offers her Scotch and cigarettes as he helps mop up the floodwater. Eventually he kisses her. When he tries again after they eat some pizza, she says they mustn’t. He admits he is married and says he thinks he loves her.
After he leaves, a drunken Daniel buzzes Bridget and asks to come up, saying he loves her. She tells him to leave and that he is drunk. Then he asks to use her toilet. The next day, Bridget reports in her diary that Daniel has spent the night and all day with her, drinking, smoking, and eating takeout. Bridget is back on thirty cigarettes a day, potentially engaged, and maybe pregnant. When she throws up at 11:45 that night, Daniel gleefully says there goes her inner poise.
On May 1, after Daniel finally leaves, Bridget assumes she must be pregnant. Later in the week she gets a positive result on a home pregnancy test. She meets S to show her, and S tells her it’s supposed to be two blue lines, not one—Bridget isn’t pregnant. Bridget sulks about her “lost baby,” but soon forgets the episode. Daniel is away in Manchester during the week, but they get together on Saturday. Bridget is thrown off by their new arrangement, as their relationship so far has been charged by the idea that one of them isn’t supposed to sleep with the other; now there is nothing stopping them and the friction is gone. The following weekend, Bridget’s friends Shazzer and Jude come over and rant about men. Daniel arrives with boxes of chocolates for each of them, and he politely puts away eight bags of groceries. He then offers to give the women lifts home when their taxis don’t arrive. Bridget is secretly proud to have her perfect boyfriend.
Bridget’s mother calls insisting she let her take Bridget to Colour Me Beautiful, where they can determine which colors of clothing and makeup best suit Bridget’s skin tone and hair. Bridget’s mother insists she looks too drab in her blacks and silvers. Magda comes over and explains that Jeremy admitted to a crush and flirtation, but claims he hasn’t done anything with the girl. Magda tells Bridget to appreciate being single, because life raising a toddler and a baby while everyone thinks you laze about isn’t fun. Bridget comments on the issue of single women wishing they were married, and married women thinking it would be better to be single. Either way, they’re miserable.
Bridget’s mother forces Bridget to sit down for an interview on Suddenly Single in which Bridget would be obscured visually, her face in silhouette. Bridget protests that she is in a relationship but her mother insists. The camera crew crashes into her flat Saturday morning and her mother asks if she felt suicidal after her husband left her. Bridget is confused and angry. Daniel wakes up after having slept late in Bridget’s bedroom and introduces himself to Bridget’s mother, accidentally exposing Bridget’s mother as a fraud in front of her crew. Bridget ends the month looking forward to going on mini-breaks (short holidays) with Daniel over the summer.
Analysis
In March, Fielding builds on the theme of indulging and dieting as Bridget reflects on the irony that she is the same weight at the end of February as she was at the beginning, even though she was dieting the whole time. The reader understands that this statement is something of a lie she is telling herself, as Bridget’s weight-management strategy involves oscillating between extreme calorie restriction and days of indulgence. Ultimately, her tendency is to cancel out any “progress” she makes, likely because she is inducing binge cravings by feeding her body far less than health professionals recommend.
As the month progresses, Bridget indulges in the taboo flirtation with her boss. Despite having slept together, Bridget is no more clear on his intentions with her. On Tom’s advice, she plays a psychological power game with Daniel, knowingly enticing him by not giving him the attention he craves. While her strategy works, in an instance of situational irony, the moment she slips up and agrees to go away to Prague with him, Daniel withdraws the offer. This prompts Bridget again to call out his “emotional fuckwittage” (i.e. male immaturity) and remind him that she warned him to treat her well.
The themes of friendship and middle-class social conventions arise with Bridget’s disastrous birthday dinner. Hoping to save money and still impress her friends, she devises a dinner party plan at her flat that quickly spirals out of her control as the guest list grows to include people’s partners and her second-tier friends who don’t want to be left out. Bridget expects that a middle-class woman like herself ought to be capable of performing the role of sophisticated host, but Bridget’s inclination is to procrastinate and be lazy.
Ultimately, the pressure to pull together a fancy dinner for so many people leaves Bridget ruining dishes and resenting her friends. However, in an instance of situational irony, it turns out that Magda has booked a restaurant already, as she knows Bridget well enough to have predicted the dinner at home wouldn’t come together. This prompts Bridget to switch her attitude again, and she is back to loving her friends.
Fielding builds further on the theme of marital strife with an unexpected update from Bridget’s mother. Not only has she separated from Bridget’s father, Pam has taken a job as a television presenter, having found an opportunity to turn her newfound single-ness into a late-in-life career change. Bridget makes her exasperation with her mother evident by the way she ends her diary entry after relaying her mother’s news, letting the lack of context and explanation speak for themselves. Marital strife also arises in the scene where Bridget discovers Magda’s husband on what looks like it may be a date. As it turns out when Magda arrives in crisis at Bridget’s flat, it was a date, and Jeremy has admitted to having feelings for this other woman. Once again, Bridget is witnessing a married couple’s ostensibly unbreakable bond suddenly crumble.
The theme of love enters the story with Bridget and Daniel’s sudden entry into a relationship at the end of April. After the will-they-won’t-they tension of the past months, Bridget and Daniel spend a full weekend together and break through the power dynamic that had been keeping them apart. Bridget is overjoyed to have both the sexual release and the confirmation her feelings are reciprocated, but her neuroses can’t let her enjoy the moment without fearing she must be pregnant. In an instance of situational irony, Bridget’s belief that she is pregnant is undermined by Sharon explaining she has read her home pregnancy test incorrectly.
