Fielding admitted some parts of the story have not aged well.
“Bridget Jones’s Diary couldn’t be written now, set now, because all those men in the office would be sacked,” she said. “It was a really different time.”
That harassment is “all still there” in real life, however, she added. “It’s just under the parapet. It’s not gone away.”
Bridget’s calorie counting came directly from the diaries Fielding wrote at university, she said.
“There was not much in them in the way of social engagements, but every day there was my weight and a list of food with calories next to it – like yogurt 150 calories, carrot 15 calories, box of milk tray 4,000 calories.
“Don’t get cross about the character, look at the response to the character. I wasn’t writing that to try and say, everyone be like me and make these lists. I just wrote it and then there was this response of people who identified with it.
“So that’s the question – why did people identify with someone feeling like that? And why are the Gen Zs still identifying with that sense that your body’s all wrong, and then still coping on top of that with the fact that they shouldn’t be thinking about it in the first place?”
She added: “Why do people identify with it, is the question. It’s not that she’s influencing people, it’s that people are responding to that emotional truth in the first book.”