Helen Fielding, the creator of Bridget Jones, has identified a whole new variety of 'singleton', alive and well and living in Los Angeles.

These women, who she says are surgically-enhanced and rake thin, surround her every day as she works on a new book in a cafe near her Los Angeles home. They may, she adds, provide inspiration for a new book about being rich.

Describing the phenomenon during an appearance at the Hay Festival of Literature yesterday, Fielding said she calls them 'men-women'.

'They have no bottoms and huge breasts,' she said. 'How can you walk around and pretend they are not there? They really should introduce them to people.'

Fielding, who has already coined popular terms for several social trends including smug-marrieds, singletons and mini-breaks, said she believes the emergence of men-women is a symptom of women's low self-esteem.

'They say things to each other like, "I have got exactly the same T-shirt as that! In red, yes! I got it in Gap".'

Unlike Bridget Jones, she said, men-women do not need to wear 'big pants' to hide their bulges because 'all their corsetry is inside'.

Fielding grew up in Yorkshire and became a millionairess in her thirties after the worldwide success of her two Bridget Jones novels and of the film version, starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. She attended the Hay festival with her long-term boyfriend, American sitcom-writer and producer Kevin Curran. But she would not answer questions from the audience about an imminent engagement.

She met Curran, who works on The Simpsons , when she was in LA promoting her first book. She told the crowd of 800 fans that she liked living in California because it was 'shallow and fun', although she felt it suffered from a 'very extreme example of advert syndrome'.

In a plea for women all over the world to think a little more of themselves, she said that since creating Bridget Jones, she had realised just how many women were full of self-doubt.

'I never intended Bridget to represent anything,' Fielding explained, 'but going around the world promoting the books, it was slightly horrifying to see all these high-achieving women who are so haunted by this feeling of inadequacy.

'I think all of us have the idea that we are supposed to be that woman in the advert.

'What is being promoted in adverts and magazines are not the things that make us like other people. You never see qualities like honesty, fun, or loyalty being promoted in adverts.'

The joy of being back in England, according to Fielding, was being able to smoke cigarettes in restaurants. Even her new book, which was supposed to have been set in LA, has turned nostalgically towards her roots. It is now a novel about industrial Yorkshire.

'It is going to be like Jackie Collins meets Catherine Cookson, I think... but in a bad way,' she said.

Britain, Fielding argued, is a more grounded place to live, without the same reliance on self-help literature.

'LA is a bit like a cowboy town,' she said. 'You don't realise how young it is. You see a shack and you think only a hundred years ago none of this was here.

'There is a whole bookshop full of self-help books out there and my theory is that now people don't believe in religion they are always looking for different ways to be.'

Fielding herself said the transition to successful author has been odd and she said that she wanted to write about it one day.

'I wanted to be a successful writer,' she said, 'because I wanted to be free and travel and not go to work every day. But it took a little bit of a while to get used to it.'