Renee Zellweger: We loved you the way you were

Dear Bridget Jones/Renee Zellweger,

We loved you.

As Sally Field would say, we really really loved you.

You were our modern day Elizabeth Bennet. You were the verbally incontinent spinster who smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and dressed like her mother, and still got the dishy Mark Darcy, the man of our dreams, the reincarnation of Darcy, proud and by the end of the book/movie, not prejudiced at all.

He loved you just the way you were.

We loved you just the way you were.

Much before Mindy Kaling obsessed about her size and her boyfriends in The Mindy Project and Lena Dunham let it all hang out in Girls, you showed us we were not alone in our struggles with weight, with romance, with drinking. You showed us how to tell the boss to get off (remember: "I'd rather have a job wiping Saddam Hussein's arse?"), how to take risks (go into television without experience and use a little help from friends to land a big interview), how it was all right to be a terrible cook, how it was all right to know all the words to Madonna's "Like A Virgin", how it was all right to hate one's colleagues (remember: the Sloaney Perpetua with her "vast, bulbous bottom"). You also told us it was right to take a Chardonnay to bed.

You were wonderful.

And now here you are, not looking like yourself at all.

We understand the pressure of being thin and looking youthful but how does it help to look like another person altogether? Our bodies too are showing the wear and tear of the single life, the smug married phase and now the every-woman-becomes-her-own-mother phase. We didn't go and betray the cause. We tried our best to look younger and less, er, rounded, but when we couldn't manage, we didn't go and get 5,000 units (maybe more?) of Botox.

Whatever happened to Miss Jones of the obsessive calorie count and the hourly weight measurements? Who would eat chocolates, drink gin and watch endless Christmas specials on TV, then feel guilty promising to go on a Spartan diet the next day - which never happened? Who held on to her liberal views on everything from child rearing to national politics even in the face of the toffiest of toffs?

Who will we laugh with now when we're invited to our parents' version of the Turkey Curry Buffet? Who do we seek inspiration from when we're asked to sound intelligent and don't feel it (yes we read Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus and pretend it's Susan Faludi's Backlash)? Who do we turn to when we're feeling very threatened by someone richer, thinner and much cleverer?

With much love, anxiety, and many units of Chardonnay.

Your friend