SOURCE: “Single White Female,” in Harper's Bazaar, No. 3440, July, 1998, p. 62.

In the following essay, Watson anticipates the American reaction to Bridget Jones's Diary

The name Bridget Jones may not be familiar in the U.S.—yet—but in Britain she is as famous as the Spice Girls. Three years ago the fictional diary of a single girl became a weekly newspaper column in The Independent, and Bridget Jones was born. Thirty-something, attractive, working in the media and living alone in Notting Hill (London's answer to Manhattan's West Village), she is a regular working girl and, at the same time, the skeleton in the closet of the modern superwoman: imperfect, vulnerable, obsessed with unworthy men, incapable of saying no to another glass of chardonnay and 10 cigarettes. From her inception, Bridget did not so much speak to her readers as move in with them and become their soulmate. When the...