A few reviews suggested that Fielding's success and subsequent move to America might be to blame for her difficulty creating a character as compelling as Bridget. Fielding has certainly undergone a transformation in the years since Bridget Jones. This Yorkshire-born, Oxford-educated former journalist now owns a large house with a pool and a view in a chic neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills, a home she shares with her fiance, Kevin Curran, a writer for The Simpsons, and their four-month-old son, Dashiell. Her circle of friends includes the actress Carrie Fisher and the comedian Tracey Ullman.
"I always had the idea that if you were a successful writer you would live in the South of France, and to me, LA is like that -- only with shopping," said Fielding, who made the decision to buy her house here "impulsively," while in town to write the Bridget Jones screenplay. "I just really liked Los Angeles," she added. "Of course, I was living at the Four Seasons, so perhaps that skewed my perspective."
Sitting in the west Hollywood coffee shop where she wrote much of Olivia Joules, Fielding, now 46, seemed less the publishing phenomenon than a woman rooted in everyday life, a new mother struggling to balance caring for her son with a coming book tour and trip back to Yorkshire to visit her mother. Tiffany diamonds twinkled at her ear lobes, and her engagement ring was impressive, but Fielding was dressed simply in black corduroys, black clogs and a worn, suede shirt.
Fielding is planning a sequel to Olivia Joules. "Some people have said, `Oh, it's all just copycat publishing,' but when I was writing Bridget there was an entire group of women who had all this confusion about who you were supposed to be as women, and they were not being represented in fiction," Fielding said. "My feeling now is that there will be more books with women looking outward rather than inward, women who are not just worrying about the size of their thighs but looking out at the world.
"Not that you won't still be worrying about the size of your thighs," she added with a laugh. "But it won't be to the exclusion of everything else."
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