Bright Summaries - Bridget Joness Diary by Helen Fielding (Book Analysis): Detailed Summary, Analysis and Reading Guide

The novel opens with Bridget full of positive resolutions and reluctantly on her way to her familys traditional New Years dinner. One of these resolutions is to keep a diary in which she will record her weight and the number of cigarettes, units of alcohol and calories she consumes each day. During the meal, pressured by her mother Pamela and her mothers friends, who want to see her fall into the arms of the rich divorced lawyer Mark Darcy, Bridget starts a conversation with this somewhat awkward man. Their encounter turns into a fiasco for the young thirtysomething.

Single, but terrified at the idea of ending up alone, Bridget fantasises about her boss, Daniel Cleaver, with whom she exchanges risqu messages at work. They embark on a tempestuous and unstable relationship in which neither of them seem to really know what they want. Daniel blows hot and cold, inundating Bridget with passionate messages before letting her down the next time they meet. She also involuntarily sends him mixed signals, not knowing what advice to follow between the practical guides she devours and the advice of her friends. This equivocation regarding the right attitude to adopt towards the men she lusts after will be a recurring theme in her diary.

Their relationship ends suddenly when Bridget discovers that Daniel is cheating on her with a thinner woman. The idea of playing hard to get therefore applies perfectly to their relationship, as he comes back to her repeatedly until they end up having sex one last time, when Daniel is drunk. Without him, our antiheroine lives more healthily: she officially gives up smoking and drinking, and she loses weight, a goal that she has had since the age of 18. Nonetheless, her friends think that she looks ill without these extra pounds. In any case, after a significant bout of depression, she returns to her usual weight and her bad habits.

Bridgets best friends also all experience romantic setbacks: the sweet Jude, who is going out with Vile Richard; the committed feminist Sharon; and Tom, the gay man who is in love with Pretentious Jerome. This is not a bad thing for Bridget, who is always delighted to forget about her own misery for a time in order to tend to other peoples distress.

Meanwhile, Bridgets mother leaves her husband for a Portuguese man she met on holiday and becomes a presenter on a television programme for divorced women. In order to help her daughter forget about her ex-boyfriend Daniel, Pamela finds her a job as a journalist for a television channel. Bridget sees this as an opportunity to escape her horrible head of department, Perpetua, but also to get away from Daniel Cleaver and to flourish professionally by finally becoming a serious journalist. Nevertheless, the young woman soon becomes disillusioned. Her new boss Richard Finch, a notorious cocaine addict, constantly reprimands her for her repeated lateness and makes her do often ridiculous reporting, such as interviewing hunters while sitting backwards on a horse.

Although her professional career does not appear to be taking off, Bridgets love life starts to look up when she gets to know Mark Darcy better thanks to her mother, who is arrested for joining her lover in Portugal after he has cheated her friends out of money. The lawyer manages to find the conman and gets him to come to the Joness Christmas party by telling him that Pamela has gone back to her husband. When the lover arrives at the party, Mark has him arrested by the police and in this way saves Bridgets mother from going to prison. Once the police have left with the criminal, he whisks the young woman away from the terrible family meal, takes her out to dinner at a hotel and confesses his feelings for her, which turn out to be reciprocated.

Bridget and Marks relationship, riddled with misunderstandings, faces numerous setbacks in the second volume of the saga, notably when the young woman receives love letters from an unknown person and when Rebecca, a friend of Marks who is in love with him, plants doubt in his mind. Bridget suspects that he is refusing to commit, since while he is happy to spend the night at hers, he never returns the invitation. In reality, he doesnt like his house, which he finds sinister. After a series of misunderstandings, the couple end up breaking up, with Mark suspecting Bridget of infidelity. Some time after their separation, when he wants to give her a love letter he accidentally replaces his note with the transcription of a poem. This new confusion further sets back their reunion.

Beyond these misunderstandings, Mark feels that he always comes after Bridgets friends and is being constantly analysed according to the advice in the practical guides that the young woman devours, such as Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus (book written by John Gray in 1992). When Bridget learns this, she decides to throw out all these books. Mark, who is walking past her house at that time, notices the mountain of books in the bin. In a twist of fate or a twist by the author while Bridget has got rid of all her manuals to try and win back Mark, he has had the opposite idea and got hold of as many practical guides as possible to find out how to win over Bridget again.