While Fishbowlers Rachel and Elizabeth were enjoying themselves in Williamsburg Wednesday night at John Hodgman’s Little Gray Book lecture, I ventured uptown to Marymount Manhattan College for what amounted to a panel summit on chick lit. Rona Jaffe, who’s been retroactively credited with inventing the genre when she published The Best of Everything in 1958, met up with Erica (Fear of Flying) Jong (and her daughter, Molly Jong-Fast), Nanny Diaries authors Nicola Kraus and Emma McLaughlin, and Stephanie Lessing. You may have seen the single-sentence writeup in this morning’s Page Six, which simply acknowledged the event took place—without delivering any of the evening’s actual gossip, like the way the moderator took a cell phone call during one panelist’s response, or the crazy lady in the back of the room who declared, “I love all of you, and I’ve read all your books, but I can’t understand why none of you have ever had a bestseller.”
So what was decided about chick lit? Jaffe said it was simply a new name for what was called “women’s fiction” in her day, to which Jong replied that both of them were created because “men always want to tell women what they write is shit and what men write is literature,” to which Molly said, “Who cares if chick lit’s not important to the New York Times Book Review? It sells.” Kraus suggested the perceptions were important, describing the flak she and McLaughlin caught not just from reviewers, but from within their publishing house, for daring to deviate from strict chick lit templates in their second novel, Citizen Girl, and Lessing admitted that she, too, had been approached by her publisher and asked if the protagonist of her novel, She’s Got Issues, couldn’t be made a little more likable. Which led McLaughlin to wonder, “How much are we bending to get something published?”