It's rather fun writing a female spy, because she has so much more kit. Bond never carried a hair dryer or a makeup bag. And he certainly didn't wear an uplift bra.

Oh God, what's wrong with me? Why does nothing ever work out?

You'll never get a boyfriend if you look like you wandered out of Auschwitz.

Quite quickly I grew less deranged. I had begun the process of calming down, assimilating and compromising, which is necessary to live comfortably in the world as it is, and probably is why its imbalance never changes. But underneath, my idea of life was completely altered.

I'd always hoped to write the story as a novel, but there was a long period when the [Bridget Jones's Baby: The Diaries] movie was stalled and in confusion. I felt frustrated creatively, and just couldn't work on the Baby material till the movie was sorted out.

If we can't have comedy books written about aspects of womanhood without going into a panic attack about it, then we haven't got very far at being equal.

For me, writing Bridget's [Jones] stories is an instinctive, organic thing, which tends to happen more by accident than design.