If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the last decade missing outrageous tart Bridget Jones something awful not caring about Bridget Jones like it’s a full-time job. I mean, don’t get me wrong, our gal Bridge accomplished some serious shit back in the day—it was refreshing, 20 years ago, to see the public embrace a deeply flawed, average-sized, kinda gross, unapologetically sexual heroine who stress-ate Cadbury Flakes and still landed Mr. Darcy at the end. At the time I think we all found it rather stirring, even if, in 2013, it reads like a Cathy cartoon.
But great news…someone! Author Helen Fielding has announced that, deafening indifference be damned, she’ll be publishing a new volume of Bridget Jones adventures this November. And it won’t be more of the same old she-naningans (SHE-NANIGANS!!! I can’t believe me sometimes!), it’ll be…older. And with more osteoperosis and sleep-eating. Woohoo.
Set in London, the new book will show Jones at “a later stage in her life.” Fielding explained: “My life has moved on … and Bridget’s will move on, too … I hope people will have as much fun reading it, as I am writing it.”
Since Fielding didn’t offer any specifics of what might befall Bridget in this upcoming installment, I took it upon myself to speculate. Here are some potential plotlines for the older, wrinklier, more worldly-wise Bridget Jones of 2013:
1. A perimenopausal Bridget Jones flies to Dubai on an all-expenses-paid luxury vacation, but all of her vagina creams and vitamins are confiscated at the border! Rats! Instead, she lubricates herself with mashed native yam and it works great until she gets deported. The end. Oh wait, that was Samantha Jones. My bad. Still works, though. Still works.
2. To ensure that svelte modern-day Renee Zellwegger will be able to reprise her role as the more full-figured Bridget in the inevitable film adaptation, this sequel revolves mainly around Bridget’s relationship with an 8-foot tapeworm she meets at a speed dating do. The tapeworm, Eric, confesses that he “likes” Bridget even with her convex human cheeks and immense 35-inch hip-span, which everyone at speed-dating agrees is extremely brave of both of them. As it turns out, what Eric actually means is that he would “like” to live inside her and milk her of nutrients until she is dead. And so they do. Ah, love.
3. An elderly Bridget relocates to a sleepy retirement community in Florida. Following a hilarious mishap in which she splits her trousers diving for what she thinks is a brown M&M on the pool deck (it is actually a spider), Bridget falls in the pool and discovers that it has been charged with magic alien life force. She now has the strength of two Don Ameches. After a failed May/December tryst with local mariner Steve Guttenberg, Bridget decides to abandon earth and go live with the aliens. She almost misses the ship after a mischievous bird steals her panties, but snaps its neck with her bare hands and dashes up the gangplank in the nick of time, leaving behind only a trail of lolly wrappers and used condoms. Guttenberg weeps.
4. Bridget, now 56, spends most of her time cutting off skin tags and re-watching entire seasons of Say Yes to the Dress: Randy Knows Best (HE REALLY DOES, THOUGH) that she can’t recall if she’s seen or not because of Xanax amnesia. She’s come to terms with the fact that her job will never fulfill her in the ways she’d hoped—she can settle for “tolerable” over “satisfying”—and, anyway, she’s grateful to her male bosses to allow her to keep working even though she yo-yos between 12 and 16 pounds overweight. Her marriage has grown chaste and companionate, and she’s taken up crocheting with other women in the neighborhood who call her a whore behind her back for going to the mailbox without pantyhose. At the book’s climax Bridget finds a stale crisp between the fitted sheet and the mattress pad and she eats it. She is content.