CONTENTS
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Helen Fielding
Dedication
Title Page
Prologue
Plenty of Fuckwits
The Art of Concentration
Dark Night of the Soul
Part One: Born-Again Virgin
2012 Diary
A New Start – A New Me
Social Media Virgin
The Flabby Diaphragm
Makeover!
Smug Married Hell
A Plan
A Daniel in Shining Armour
The Perfect Babysitter
The Stronghold
Aftermath
Women Change Their Minds
Crashing Wave
How Not to Do Dating
The Number One Key Dating Rule
Continuing Dating Incompetence
Escalating Dating Incompetence
Intensive Dating Study
Wallowing in It
Christmas
Part Two: Mad About the Boy
2013 Diary
Perfect Mother
A Needle in a Twitterstack
Do Not Tweet When Drunk
Twunken Aftermath
Screenwriter
Let it Snow!
Do Not Tweet About Date During Date
Date With Toy Boy
Joy Mixed With Sick
Getting to Second Date
Hard-Hats-Offing!
The Barnacle’s Penis
To Sleep With or Not to Sleep With?
Second Date With Toy Boy
Deflowered
Back in the Present Moment
Dark Night of the Soul
Power Mother
Nits in the Works
Nit-Infestered Power Meeting
Fire! Fire!
The Trouble With Summer
Direction!
The Trouble With Outfits
Heady Glamorous Times
Talitha’s Party
Part Three: Descent Into Chaos
Horrible No-Good Very Bad Day
Overstuffed Lives
Mini-Break or Break-Up?
Is it Snow or is it Blossom?
Frantic
Farting Sports Day
The Deep Freeze
That’s What Friends Are For
The Yawning Void
Just the Way They Are
Let’s Face the Music and Tea-Dance
Getting Online
KBO
The Summer Concert
The Horror, The Horror
Mid-Match Collision
Rekindling
Blimey
Giving In
Part Four: The Great Tree
Summer of Fun
Back to School
The Mighty Jungle
Parents’ Evening
Fifty Shades of Old
The Sound of Shells Cracking
A Hero Will Rise
’Tis the Season
The Carol Concert
The Owl
The Year’s Progress
Outcome
Acknowledgements
Copyright
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.
Also by Helen Fielding
Cause Celeb
Bridget Jones’s Diary
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination
To Dash and Romy
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.