#44: the stars look very differently today
Bridget Jones's Diary and William Byrd II of Westover's Secret History of the Dividing Line
Dear Readers:
Each month, you will receive an email from me about the boredom & the horror & the glory. This is the 44th one.
Staying there over the summer in college made me feel like Major Tom at the end of “Space Oddity,” a song my little brother had, not long before, learned all the lyrics of and sang mournfully through the night back at home.
This was summer 2002, between my junior and senior years, and I subletted the room of a girl who had gone home for the summer. I set up my desktop computer, which had about eight enormous pieces and about 20 tangled cords, on her dusty desk, in the dust-free squares and rectangles her desktop computer had left behind. Before I went to bed each night, I attempted to download Ani DiFranco’s entire catalog on Napster. When I woke up, I was excited to see which songs had downloaded successfully–usually about three or four. I played these newly downloaded songs every morning while I got ready for my job and internship.
One of my favorites was about Ani coming home from a long tour and realizing all the problems she had left behind in her relationship were still there. “How can I come home with nothing to say? I know you’re going to look at me that way, saying what did you do out there, what did you decide, you said you needed time and you had time.” I’m realizing as I write this that I still know the entire song, though I haven’t listened to it since that summer. It gave me a feeling of complicated, adult romances. I hoped one day to be in a “long distance relationship,” a term that spoke to me of miles traveled, hearts broken, healed, and broken again. When I think about this now, I feel literally beyond embarrassed; talk about miles traveled, I’ve gone through every level of embarrassment to reach a Zen state where I feel no embarrassment at all.
In the mornings, I worked at the law library. This was the part of the day where I made money to pay my $175 rent. It involved sitting in the cubicle of an incredibly cool adult woman who sang in bars at night. She introduced me to soy milk. All I did was chat with her. There was nothing to do, because the law school students weren’t there during the summer.
I got fired midway through the summer for laughing too loudly with my friend, who worked in the music library and had come to visit me for a few minutes. The head law librarian, who almost never left his office, came out and yelled at us.
“You’re both fired! This is completely unsuitable behavior.”
“She doesn’t work here,” I said, gesturing at my friend. My friend laughed.
“Get out of here, now,” he said to me. “Never come back again.”
He returned to his office, slamming the door in a scary way.
“He doesn’t have the power to ban you from the library,” the woman whose cubicle I sat in said, “but you should probably leave now. I’m sorry.”
In the afternoons, I interned as a writer at a liberal political action organization. This organization, whose name I don’t remember, was plugged into a media ecosystem that no longer exists. I did things like post on Alternet and write summaries of articles from UTNE, Mother Jones, and In These Times. I guess those outlets are still around. Then, though, they were traces of a coursing, vibrant counterculture that you had to expend energy to learn about and be involved in. They were on the Internet, but their Internet presences were like a whisper of their real-life presences, a sign to the world that they existed, not the meat of their existence.
One night, I was chatting with my roommate, who was nice but not a friend or even a friend of a friend, just a person who was also living in the apartment. I was intimidated by her. She was pretty and I think she played a sport on the college team. She told me about a great book she had read, Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding. “I know this sounds stupid, but it’s really good,” she said. “Do you want to borrow it?” I was dubious–it didn’t seem like something I’d like. On the other hand, all the kids at college were smart. It wasn’t like grad school, where part of what you do is try to investigate every corner of the other students’ mental capacities to see if there is even one little part that’s stupid. So I respected my roommate’s opinion about Bridget Jones, enough to read the book.
I loved it. It combined with the woman whose cubicle I’d sat in before I got fired, the grungy political activists at my internship, who wore beanies indoors through the summer and lived alone in the Central West End, and the illegal Ani downloads, into a multipronged but unified sense of being a woman. Something about difficult relationships, messy emotions, buying stuff, caring a lot, deep thoughts and arguments, going to loud, dark places at night, and working hard–not necessarily at your job but at something. Oh, and being thin.
Bridget starts almost every diary entry with a numerical reckoning of the day. Here are some examples:
Monday 16 January: 128 lbs. (from where? why? why?), alcohol units 1, cigarettes 20, calories 20, calories 1500, positive thoughts 0.
Tuesday 18 April: 126 lbs., alcohol units 7 (oh dear), cigarettes 30, calories (cannot bear to think about it), lottery tickets 1 (excellent).
Friday 6 October: 126 lbs. (comfort eating), alcohol units 6 (drink problem), lottery tickets 6 (comfort gambling), 1471 calls to see if Mark Darcy has rung 21 (curiosity only, obviously).
Thinking about it now, Bridget Jones reminds me of William Byrd’s The Secret History of the Dividing Line, an early 18th-century document discovered in the early 20th century.1 Byrd, like Bridget, is sort of British and sort of American (Helen Fielding / Renee Zellweger): born in Virginia, educated in England as a son of British aristocracy. He was a slave-owning “gentleman planter” who represented Virginia i an exploration of the disputed boundary between Virginia and North Carolina. From this trip, he wrote The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina and, concurrently, The Secret History of the Line.
Byrd ends most entries of his Secret Diary with the types of personal accounting familiar to readers of Bridget Jones:
October 1711: ...I neglected to say my prayers but had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God Almighty.
January 1712: ...I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God Almighty.
February 1712: ...I said my prayers and had good health, good thoughts, and good humor, thank God Almighty. I rogered my wife again.
Byrd’s official and secret histories are both funny, interesting, and shocking, but the secret is the freakier of the two, so I prefer it. Like Bridget Jones, it is full of confessions. Both Byrd and Bridget are very concerned with the scatological and sexual parts of life. They are food obsessives, heavy drinkers, and exercisers (“I danced my dance,” Byrd writes often), and they both pay attention to their dreams. They are guilty, funny, smart, charming, and petty.
They wink at the moral contradictions of their social circumstances, but they don’t have the energy or integrity or vision to rise above those circumstances. Considering how to respond to her boss’s message about her short skirt, Bridget writes, “Hmm. Think will cross last bit out as contains mild accusation of sexual harassment whereas v. much enjoying being sexually harrassed by Daniel Cleaver.” Ending his account of a typical day of slave-disciplining and beef-killing, Byrd writes, “I said my prayers and had good thoughts, good humor, and good health, thank God Almighty. I dreamed a coffin was brought into my house and thrown into the hall.”
Both their birthdays are in late March, and they use them as occasions to remind themselves to be “better,” different.
Byrd, March 28, 1710: This was my birthday, on which I am 36 years old, and I bless God for granting me so many years. I wish I had spent them better.
The “March” chapter in Bridget Jones is titled, “Severe Birthday-Related Thirties Panic.” Her birthday entry begins, “126 lbs, alcohol units 9, cigarettes 42, calories 4295.” And it ends,
for coming year will reactive New Year’s Resolutions, adding the following:
I will
Stop being so neurotic and dreading things.
I will not
Sleep with, or take any notice of, Daniel Cleaver anymore.
In Elizabeth Egan’s recent New York Times piece commemorating 25 years of Bridget Jones, she finds a few things to admire today about the novel, like Bridget’s cleverness and the novel’s influence on a whole generation of chick-lit, but she rues the anti-woman culture that made Bridget Jones make sense and seem funny. She points out that Bridget fans tended to be “white, educated, privileged, independent, opinionated and empowered.” She says something beautiful after that:
They — fine, we — coasted into adulthood secure in the knowledge that mothers, grandmothers and women’s studies professors had won the hardest battles. Sure, we had a few things to iron out — racism, homophobia, equal pay, child care — but the scaffolding was in place. All we had to do was build a skyscraper to bear its weight.
I italicized that last sentence because I like it so much.
Egan says of Bridget’s protagonist’s “obsession with weight and fat”:
It might have been depressingly funny 25 years ago; now it’s just depressing. Imagine what we could have done with the hours, weeks and years wasted on Entenmann’s fat-free poundcake and step aerobics.
As Byrd says, “I wish I had spent them better.” But those years aren’t coming back. Byrd and Bridget are light chronicles of heavy lives. At the back of everything, they’re both worried they’re going to hell. That’s what all the counting and accounting are about. But they’re already in hell.
I like seeing a character so smart–bookish, actually–with so much potential to do good be dragged under by her obsession with being 119 pounds and having a handsome man fall in love with her. She isn’t stupid, and she isn’t annoying; she’s acting stupid and annoying. That spoke to me when I read it in the summer of 2002, and it speaks to me now. Byrd is learned, always reading Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, but he adopts an annoying persona in his Secret History, too. Bridget is caught in the 20th century. Byrd—and his rogered wife and the enslaved people they ruled over—were caught in 18th. They’re from the past. That they can’t help. In that, at least, these diarists didn’t do anything wrong.
Sincerely,
Lucy
Actually, it was decoded, not discovered, in the early 20th century. It was written in a shorthand presented in a 1707 book by William Mason titled, “La Plume Volante. Or, the Art of Short-Hand Improv’d,’" and intended for distribution among Byrd’s friends.
In his journals, Tolstoy also keeps a hand-wringing account of how often he gambles, whores and masturbates. Very comforting.
this newsletter inspired me to read bridget jones and i got halfway through it in one boring workday yesterday. i love it. i love what you said here too, “She isn’t stupid, and she isn’t annoying; she’s acting stupid and annoying.” unfortunately i relate