The whole chick lit debate

Okay, this topic is way too big (not to mention political) for me to delve into deeply here, but a fabulously funny cartoon done by Patricia Storms, (check it out), and a “roundtable discussion” by some of the contributors to the mean-spirited anthology THIS IS NOT CHICK LIT inspired me to say a few words.

First, I love many kinds of fiction. I know lots of people who only like reading in one genre. I'm not one of those people. I like the sort of books Oprah picks. I don’t mind if books are depressing. I don't mind if they're joyous. I don’t mind the main character’s not someone I’d like to know. I’m okay with happy or sad endings. I love endings that surprise me, but I also like ones I see coming from the first page, but are satisfying nonetheless. I like to read for lots and lots of reasons and sometimes just to be entertained.

The assertion that humourous, fast-paced books aren’t well written or aren’t to be taken seriously, or are less worthy simply because they don’t choose to tackle tricky topics, has always been a major irritant of mine. Some entertaining fast-paced books do tackle tricky subjects and I would claim that authors who can tackle meaty subjects and still make their books entertaining are far more talented than ones who create weighty tomes difficult to slog through. But that sounds too judgmental and that was not my intent.

Related to this irritant is the lack of attention given to women’s books by the publishing industry, reviewers, etc. Yes, there are some very well respected female authors in the literary world, yes we’ve come a long way baby, but still a HUGE percentage of all books reviewed by the major papers and trade publications are written by men.

This makes no sense. More books are written by women. More books are read by women. But most books written by women for women get no respect. What gives?

This is obviously not something I’m going to solve here today, nor am I going to try to. Others have already written eloquent essays on the topic—Lauren Baratz-Logsted, Jennifer Weiner and Shanna Swendson to name a few—but one thing said by one of the THIS IS NOT authors really ticked me off. (Lots of things did, but this one is small and easy to tackle.) She said that to call Jane Austen’s books chick lit was ridiculous because the term hadn’t even been invented yet then.

HUH??? She couldn’t have missed the point any further if she’d closed her eyes and spun before shooting off her mouth.

The point being made by suggesting Jane Austen was a chick lit author, is to assert that if she’d written those same books today, tackling the same socio-political and moral subjects, with the same plots, they would’ve been given hot pink covers and marketed as chick lit. (Or possibly romance. I’m not going to quibble on that one, but the heroine-centric nature of her books make them more chick lit than romance, to me.) The point is, PRIDE AND PREJUDICE would NOT be marketed as literary fiction today (if it even was then, I doubt it). It’s straightforward (very good) storytelling style is too simplistic. It’s too light, too funny—not heavy enough. No one gets raped. No one’s in rehab. No one was molested as a child. IT HAS A HAPPY ENDING! (Horrors)

I’ve never been a fan of the term chick-lit, but it’s not the authors’ fault that the industry coined this term and started to paint most non-romance fiction written by women for women with a bright-pink, chick-lit brush. Chick lit authors are just trying to write books women enjoy reading, that they enjoy reading, that they enjoy writing. The THIS IS NOT anthology contributors aimed their vitriol in the wrong direction, in my opinion. They should have criticized the industry for coining the phrase and further ghettoizing women’s fiction, rather than trying to claim they were superior to the authors whose books happen to be labeled as chick lit.
If you want to try one of the anthologies, try this one instead.