Bridget Jones Resurfaces

Women around the world have come to know Bridget Jones. The witty, single British woman who reads self-help books, loves wine and is obsessed with losing weight is the main character in a popular book Bridget Jones' Diary.

She's back in a new book by author Helen Fielding called Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Fielding spoke with Co-Anchor Jane Clayson on The Early Show.

Fielding explains her character's popularity as follows: "It's about the gap between how women feel they're expected to be and how they actually are. We've all got this feeling like we're supposed to the girl in the 24-hour mascara ad rushing from the gym to the boardroom thing and home to cook dinner for 12 people." It's refreshing to see someone trying so hard, getting it wrong and laughing about it, she says.

She describes Bridget as a "a single thirtysomething girl. And like so many women, she feels she's supposed to be so much better than she actually is."

"In the first book, we talk a lot about her diet. And so she's always picky and mixing," Fielding says. If she wants a baked potato, she switches diets. "And in this one she's concentrating more on what's inside."

The character has evolved a bit, Fielding says, adding, "I wouldn't go over the top about it."

In her diary, Bridget starts off every section with an interesting description. Every chapter begins with the date, her weight, her cigarettes and her alcohol use.

Fielding reads aloud one entry: "Saturday, 26 April, 130 pounds;...alcohol units, 7 (hurrah!); cigarettes, 27 (hurrah!); calories, 4,248 (hurrah!); gym visits, O (hurrah!)"

These are loosely loosely based on Fielding's own journal entries from college. Those consisted of lists of food, such as carrots and yogurt, and their caloric content, she says. "If you're not careful, you can end up thinking and monitoring whatever you do to try to be better," Fielding reveals.

Fielding has some unusual ways of describing people in the book.

For example, there's the singletons. "Single thirtysomething women were trapped in an old-fashioned idea of the sort of tragic, barren spinster left on the shelf, which is completely out of date. Singletons is a new way of describing what is a completely normal state," Fielding says.

Another category is the smug married. Mentionitis is yet another. "That's when somebody is having an affair with someone, and the way you know that is that person's name keeps coming up irrelevantly in the conversation."

Bridget has quite a following, but some say she has set women back. She can't balance a checkbook and doesn't make good decisions.

"I think it's very interesting," Fielding says. "My first book was set in a refugee amp in Africa, and nobody bought that one. And I started writing this as an exaggerated joke about women's imperfections. Four million people bought it."

"What does that say? I think we're trying to be forced into being too perfect and forgetting what's inside is what matters, and that's just fine," Fielding adds.