Very Bridget Jones. Are they all involved in a mass method-acting routine at Viking's New York office? Perhaps it's a homage. For B-Day was in honour of the American publication of Bridget Jones's Diary, the British publishing success story of last year. Its author, Helen Fielding, has begun a 14-day promotional jamboree in the States. The operation is, as Dorman says, huge, and across the board. ``New York Times loves it, big feature in USA Today, she's going to be on the Today show....''

Taking America -- beach by beach, presumably -- is the latest stage in the rise of 40-year-old Fielding. Bridget Jones's Diary, published in the UK in late1996, is no longer described as a mere book; it's now a phenomenon, the sort that inspires all manner of pseudo-sociological chatter. Fielding's creation -- a thirty-something single woman who lives in London's Notting Hill and works in television -- has been used as a peg on which to hang shifting demographics. (So we learn that, of 3.8 million British women in their thirties, almost one million are single.) Or else she is a vivid representative of a type a Lady Lad, a Woman Behaving Badly.

Serious investigative journalism tells us that Fielding can be spotted on the step machine at the Lambton Place health club in Notting Hill, and big news she is involved with a man, a European in his thirties. Friends are keen to keep him a secret, beacuse he is not in the media and so does not know the game. Fielding knows the game very well, having worked in the media for 20 years. After graduating from Oxford in 1979 she secured a production job with the BBC, working across the output from children's TV to lightentertainment.

Fielding moved on to producing inserts for Comic Relief, one of whose prime movers is Richard Curtis, writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral, former boyfriend and current confidant. She tends to avoid discussing her love life. TV producer John Lloyd, war photographer Roger Hutchings, and ex-Sunday Times literary editor Harry Ritchie are also former lovers. Some associates mutter that she is been lucky to have well-placed friends, but none discount the talent needed to profit from them. And Fielding is quick to acknowledge debt, crediting Curtis with helpful suggestions when she was working on her first novel, Cause Celeb.

Bridget Jones was born in the pages of The Independent in 1995, the result of a suggestion by features editor Charles Leadbeater, who was in the market for a column to attract young women. (Bridget Jones's Diary appears in The Daily Telegraph; for which Fielding receives $160,000 a year.) Leadbeater figured Fielding would beright for the brief because she is good at capturing women ``pulled in different directions''. Single versus settling down; ambition versus mocking media ways.

There's a sequel in autumn and the film adaptation sripted by Fielding herself, and with LA Confidential's Curtis Hanson in the frame as director set for release next summer. ``She has taken nicely to the celebrity lifestyle'' is about as waspish as Fielding appraisals get.