New York: what if Bridget Jones,
fictional chronicler of the trials and
tribulation of 30-something singletons,
had left London to become a tabloid reporter in new your?
A what if, as well as chasing news stories, she had a Carrie Bradshaw-link column, detailing her troubled love-life and bad dates?
A book not unlike tabloid love by Bridget Harrison, published this month, might well have been the result. But unlike Candace Bushnell’s sex and the city and Helen fielding’s Bridget join’s diary, Harrison’s book is a memoir.
In a crowded chick lit field, it is to Harrison’s credit she has opted not to fictionalize her experience. “Most people tend to do these thinly veiled portrayals. I thought I’d quite like to put my money where my mouth is and write the real thing,” Harrison, 35, says. “Everything in my book is 100 percent true.”
Bridget quits a comfortable job as assistant features editor with the times of London to plunge in at the deep as a general assignment reporter at the New York post. She break up with the boyfriend she left behind in England, has many bad dates, yearns
After and wins ‘Jack’ a senior editor at the Post, only to lose him, partly because he is tired of details of their relationship appearing in her column. She has a fabulous time running around town with her girl friends and more bad dates.
Her assignments often include tracking down distraught relationship of crime victims- examples include a decapitated owner of an Upper East Side restaurant and a 4-years-old
Stabbed to death by his playmates with a ball point pen.
Harrison’s other job at the paper was a column about dating in New York and much of the book is also taken up with horror stories about the men she met, including one who popped a mint in her mouth at the start of a date. She wasn’t worried about revealing embarrassing details of her personal life although she was anxious about the reaction of her ex-boyfriends and changed the names of some of them.
Harrison is now living and working in London and dating someone there in a “very New York way.” She says, “if you’re single, New York is definitely the best place to live in. But I do joke I’ve got to go back to London to find a husband.” And as for sequal ,she adds: “ I think I really would think twice about writing about love again because you do risk a lot doing it.”
