“Queenie” finds fun in life’s chaos

It was the right book at (maybe) the wrong time. That was when Candice Carty-Williams discovered “Bridget Jones’s Diary.”
“I read the book when I was too young, probably,” she told the Television Critics Association. “I stole it from my aunt’s bookshelf and I read it in the summer.”
Later, that would influence “Queenie,” her award-winning debut novel. Heralded as “the Black ‘Bridget Jpones’s Diary,’” it won awards and is now a brief comedy series (shown here), with eight half-hours arriving in one gulp Friday (June 7) on Hulu.
At first glance, Carty-Williams would seem to have nothing in common with Helen Fielding, the “Bridget Jones” author. Fielding is an Oxford grad who grew up comfortably in northern England and went to a private all-girls high school; Carty-Williams, whose parents are Jamaican natives, grew up in South London.
What clicked, she said, was: “I loved women being funny. And I grew up around a lot of funny women …. Deep down, I always wanted to kind of make something like that.”
She created Queenie Jenkins, 25 and sometimes making a mess of her life, sexually (“Queenie” is not for everyone) and socially.
That’s one of the things that Bellah (the mono-named singer) found appealing about her. “It’s amazing to have stories where Black women don’t have it all together, where they don’t have to appear strong and … clued up,” she said.
She plays Queenie’s unquestioning best friend. “As women,” she said, “we need that one friend who’s going to be like, ‘Oh, you robbed a bank? That’s fine; you needed money.’”
Queenie robs no banks, but makes plenty of mistakes, with others in her family able to point them out. Dionne Brown (shown here), the relative newcomer who plays her, knows the feeling.
“I’m also Caribbean,” she said. “And I come from a big family (with) a lot of girls …. Queenie’s sitting into what it was like to have that much feminine energy around her.”
For Carty-Williams, 34, things have moved quickly. After “Queenie” came out in 2019, she became the first Black woman to win Britain’s “Book of the Year” award. That’s been followed by a second novel (“People Person”), a young-adult novella and a British TV series (“Champion”).
Before adapting “Queenie,” she got advice from Jesse Armstrong, the “Succession” creator. “He was like: ‘Make sure you write what you want to write.’ And I was like: ‘You’re Jesse Armstrong, so you can say that.’”
But basically, it seems, she did get what she wanted.“I’m incredibly exacting as a person and … very controlling.” She worked on controlling her story about a young woman who keeps losing control of her life.