Small Spiral Notebook assembles a panel of This Is Not Chick Lit contributors, with Felicia Sullivan doing her best to build some bridges: “How can we close the gap so there is less of a rift (or is there?) between literary and chick lit?” Roxana Robinson admits she found Bridget Jones’ Diary “funny, lively and beguiling,” while Holiday Reinhorn asks a really big question: “Are readers arguing or is this just an insular argument among artists and critics and those whose job it is to market books?” Samantha Hunt also sees “a divide between art and marketing,” but adds, “There are a number of ‘how-to write a chick lit book’ manuals. I want to read the kind of literature that couldn’t be written by following a how-to manual.”
Technically, she’s right: Two is a number, and that’s how many of those chick-lit writing guides exist: Sarah Mlynowski and Farrin Jacobs’s See Jane Write and Cathy Yardley’s Will Write for Shoes. Still, maybe the week that fellow TINCL contributor Francine Prose debuted on the NYT bestseller list with Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them wasn’t the best week to make this particular argument.*
“As for Jane Austen, she was not a chick lit writer,” Hunt adds. “She was a writer dealing with the politics of her time.” This strikes me as a perfectly reasonable argument; it’s also one that describes many of your finer chick lit novels. TINCL editor Elizabeth Merrick drives the point home harder, insisting that “it is ridiculous to categorize Austen as chick lit” because chick lit wasn’t created until the late 1990s. (So what does that make Gail Parent, we wonder?) She goes on to say, “I think the big issue in marketing books by women is that there is an urgent need for a marketing category of the Girl Genius book the way we have that Boy Genius category for Thomas Pynchon, Jonathan Lethem/Franzen/Safran Foer, etc.,” a section I seem to have walked past without noticing at every bookstore I’ve ever been to. Still, there’s more to agree with in this article than some of the more tortured jeremiads against chick lit making the rounds lately, like when Robinson explains, “Fiction delivers the truest sense of our lives, of what troubles us, of what we think is funny, disturbing and frightening.” It just happens to be the case that books with pictures of shoes on the cover can do that, too.
*Not that this should in any way deter you from reading Hunt’s novel, The Seas, because she’s a pretty damn awesome fiction writer.