The Brit in all of us

Bridget Jones and Kate Reddy are heroines to millions of American women, the beloved protagonists of two bestselling novels whose overstuffed lives and conflicted emotions are as funny as they are achingly familiar. The curious thing about these two frank, self-deprecating symbols of suffering singlehood (Jones) and harried working motherhood (Reddy) is that they aren’t American at all. They sprang from the imaginations of writers Helen Fielding and Allison Pearson, respectively. And both Fielding and Pearson, as well as their creations, are quite thoroughly British.

We’re long over being a colony trying to prove itself to the motherland. And yet, isn’t it odd that a number of novels conceived in London so aptly describe the lives we live and our feelings about them? Doesn’t that chafe our national pride just a bit? Bridget Jones was so adored that she was a natural as a movie’s star, even if it would take Texas-born actress Renee Zellweger -- sporting a British accent and additional poundage -- to embody her. Kate Reddy, a 35-year-old hedge-fund manager and mother of two whose tale is sarcastically titled “I Don’t Know How She Does It” (Knopf, 2002), is on her way to the big screen too: Miramax Pictures has purchased the film rights.

The phenomenon of contemporary British writers with their pens on some kind of trans-Atlantic pulse isn’t limited to books aimed at women. No young American male author can boast of the rabid audience of Nick Hornby, whose bestselling novels about men flummoxed by relationships -- “High Fidelity” (Putnam, 1995) and “About a Boy” (Riverhead Books, 1998) -- were made into movies as well.

If those North Atlantic island dwellers who call running shoes “trainers” and eat kippers for breakfast were really as stiff-upper-lipped and repressed as our stereotypes of them suggest, then how could they be as self-revelatory as Bridget and Kate? Of course, they couldn’t. So, it might be time to adjust our image of the English, and even to admit at least temporary defeat in this particular war of words.

“It’s the English men who are stiff and very unemotional,” says Caroline Graham, a former West Coast editor of the New Yorker and Talk Magazine who, like her friend Tina Brown, immigrated to America. “The women in Britain have tremendous interaction and are tremendously open.”

“Bridget Jones’s Diary” began as a column in the Independent, and Kate Reddy came to life in a column in the Daily Telegraph, the largest-circulation newspaper in London. Nigella Lawson, the British author and star of “Nigella Bites,” a cooking show seen here on the E! and Style cable networks, was literary editor and a columnist for the Sunday Times. “American journalists take what they do very seriously,” she says. “They’re seekers after Truth. Over here, we have such a horror of looking like we’re trying too hard. We have so many tabloids. So, British journalism is more a function of entertainment. There are many more columns that don’t attempt to be heavyweight. That frees the writers and the readers up. There’s a Latin proverb that translates as ‘art lies in hiding art.’ That may be the British way. Literary writers can have a hard time here, because they’re thought to be pretentious. We have a long history of anti-intellectualism. With columns, it’s not as if everything you sit down and write must be lofty. It can be about the everyday, about how you live your life.”

A few American success stories have challenged this particular literary hegemony of the British. Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” columns appeared in the New York Observer before they were compiled and published in 1997 (nine months before “Bridget Jones’s Diary” hit the bookstores). They became the source for the hit HBO series. “The Nanny Diaries,” by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus (St. Martin’s Press, 2002), found a following and will be made into a movie, although it offers more a poisonous look at how the other half lives than a mirror in which many of its readers can recognize themselves.

That social satire shares an important quality of the British bestsellers: It is not set in an all-American milieu. Suzanne Gluck, a William Morris literary agent who represents the “Nanny” authors, says, “The closed world of the Park Avenue Mommy is exotic to most of the American public. I think the slight exoticism of telling Bridget Jones’ or Kate Reddy’s story through a British lens was incredibly compelling. For an American audience, those stories are a little too much like life if they’re in an American context. It’s charming to be counting kilos instead of pounds or fags instead of cigarettes. I don’t think you can assume that no one here has tried to write those books. They just didn’t seem exciting to American agents or publishers.”

Although some of the details differ, American women have responded to the novels’ universal feminine themes. It makes no difference that Kate Reddy distresses store-bought mince pies so they’ll look homemade for a school Christmas party. Pastries vary. Working-mother guilt is constant.

“After the holidays, I always sense a special edge to the children’s neediness,” Kate muses in the book. “Far from being satisfied by the time we’ve had together they seem famished, as ravenous for my attention as newborns. It’s as though the more they have of me, the more they’re reminded how much they want. (Maybe that’s true of every human appetite: sleep begets sleep; eating makes you hungry; [sex] stokes desire.) Clearly, my kids have not grasped the principle of Quality Time.”

“Before I was married, I was Bridget Jones,” says New Yorker Meryl Poster, “and now I’m this character, Kate Reddy.” The 38-year old Miramax Films co-president of production first read some of the Kate Reddy columns when she was pregnant with her second child. “The day I go for amniocentesis is my favorite time,” she says, “because I can’t take any business calls. All I do is lie around and eat Mallomars and read. A woman like me doesn’t usually get to read for enjoyment. What struck me about Kate Reddy is a lot of it is sad and a little depressing, but it’s so real. It spoke to me, both personally and professionally.”

With a 4-year-old daughter, a 10-month-old son and a high-octane job, Poster understands Kate Reddy’s struggles. “No matter how helpful the husband is, and my husband is extremely helpful, there are some things that a mother takes responsibility for -- doing the birthday party, scheduling the child’s appointments and activities,” she says. “And those are the highlights in a working woman’s day. They just fall to the mother. It’s an evolutionary skill, I guess.”

Miramax bought Kate Reddy’s story before the novel was completed. “We were interested in doing another ‘Bridget Jones’-type movie, something that speaks to women on an emotional and humorous level,” Poster says. “It’s really hard to replicate these really well-done books. Americans wear everything on our sleeves. We’re very open about how hard it is to be a working mother, but we go on ‘Oprah’ and talk about it. The British have the same kinds of thoughts, but instead of just talking about them, they write them down in these novels that are so current and meaningful.”

The category of “chick lit” did grow steadily in turn-of-the-millennium America, with such notable contributions as Melissa Bank’s “The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing” (Viking, 1999), Lucinda Rosenfeld’s “What She Saw” (Random House, 2000) and Laura Zigman’s “Animal Husbandry” (Dial Press, 1998). But no American character challenged Bridget Jones’ iconic status. Rather, American faith in the Popular Mechanics approach to life -- follow these steps and the engine will roar -- produced a nonfiction canon of manuals on sex and love. Londoners laughed along with Bridget Jones. Angelenos earnestly studied “The Rules.”

Ellen Kunes, Redbook editor in chief, is married with 5-year-old twin sons.

“American women have always had a very can-do attitude,” she says. “When you go out into this country, you find that women aren’t obsessing so much about their lives, they’re living them. We find in our magazine that what women want are the tools to make their lives work better.”

Fielding now lives in Los Angeles, where she’s observed more action than introspection. “In England, there’s a tendency to be quite self-conscious,” she says. “We spend more time sitting, drinking bottles of wine in front of the fireplace and contemplating our navels instead of galloping across the plains.” The author credits a smaller literary pond for helping her novel sell so swimmingly. “There’s less media in England, so it’s easier to get attention there.”

Nita Taublib, executive vice president and deputy publisher at Bantam Dell, agrees. “The U.K. book market is so much more publicity driven, especially for fiction, than ours,” she says. “There is a much more circumscribed audience there, and they make a more intensive publicity effort and create more of a buzz. The parties they throw and the stunts they do, it’s astounding.” Taublib has published British author Sophie Kinsella’s “Confessions of a Shopaholic” (2001) and “Shopaholic Takes Manhattan” (2002), bestselling comic novels featuring dedicated spendthrift Becky Bloomwood, a 25-year-old financial journalist. “Universal themes, treated in a way everyone gets, translate whether readers are in London or New York. What makes these books work is the writer’s voice.”

Pearson believes the British gift for pessimism and irony has well served her, and her countrymen, in print. She says, “ ‘Bridget Jones’ and Nick Hornby’s books and mine have extreme irony in common. And irony isn’t the normal American mode. It may be a weaker country’s mode. Irony is for wimps. Britain has been losing power and prestige for the last 50 or 100 years. That brings a certain ruefulness. The British capacity for moaning is considerable. Gloom is the national hobby.”

A relentlessly positive attitude leaves little room for a sense of humor, something American feminists have long been accused of lacking. Kate Reddy doesn’t pretend she can have it all, unless “it” can be defined as baby drool on her blouse, sleep deprivation and the distant memory that sex used to be fun.

“The women I’ve encountered in the U.S. feel that owning up to weakness is taboo,” Pearson says. “American women keep looking for the positive aspects of juggling motherhood and a career. They’re still hoping to find out that day care is good for your kids. My book is saying all kinds of things that have been unsayable. For a woman, especially Americans, owning up to anything that might make you unlikable is difficult. We want to have everything men have, and to be liked as well.”

Redbook editor Kunes believes British authors complain more, albeit humorously, because their pain is greater than ours. “The feeling that kept coming back to me, reading about Kate Reddy, was that her problems were so 1989,” she says. “Our society makes it easier for a woman to lead a full life, one with work and family. These books are wonderfully written and they’re biting and wonderfully honest and fun, but it’s clear theirs is a more male-dominated, traditional society, and they’re dealing with more ingrained chauvinistic attitudes. The good news for American women is our society is way more progressive. We aren’t writing these books because we aren’t experiencing these problems as intensely.”

Writing is often a no-guts, no-glory endeavor. On the subject of working mothers, the spoils seem to be going to Pearson, a woman brave enough to whine and clever enough to infuse her lament with comedy. Los Angeles transplant Graham thinks Americans dump their frustrations in the wrong place: “I see more depression and visits to doctors here in the States. Perhaps it is writing that is cathartic, not a trip to the psychiatrist. The English have figured out that writing can be a form of therapy that pays better.”