Apparently, when I met Jane Green (left) at last week’s “fun & fearless fiction” part at Cosmo headquarters, I set wheels in motion. I had asked for her thoughts on an attack on the chick lit label by Erica Jong in that morning’s Huffington Post, and although she hadn’t yet read the piece, Green did offer some general observations about the genre and its critical reception in the interval between her debut novel, Swapping Lives, and the out-next-week Second Chances. “Chick lit has been around for about a dozen years,” she told me that evening, “and people have been saying that it’s dying for 11 of them.”
After that, it turns out, Green went home and read Jong’s article, then she blogged about it on MySpace. For Green, the article represented “one of our literary legends standing up and actually defending chick lit, and defending it with clarity and truth,” thereby emboldening her own vision of the genre as “an accurate reflection of the lives women are living today, a reflection without judgement.” Much supportive comment from fans followed. “Erica’s right,” Green concluded. “[Love] matters. And I for one am going to keep writing about it.”