Last Thursday, GalleyCat events correspondent Amanda ReCupido swung by (the soon-to-be-renamed) McNally Robinson where Janelle Brown (left) was having an ice cream social to celebrate the publication of her first novel All We Ever Wanted Was Everything. “The title actually comes from a Bauhaus song,” Amanda reports; in the novel, one of the character reads the lyrics at a graduation party. “The novel looks at how success affects different people in Silicon Valley,” she adds. “Though Brown addresses women and business, she admits she ‘didn’t plan on a business story;’ she was more interested in family stories and simply ‘felt the female characters.’ Brown turned to fiction writing after a decade-long journalism career in which she was ‘tired of telling the truth,’ though she learned much about storytelling: ‘I would start to imagine how the news would be much more interesting if only so-and-so had done x instead. It was a huge relief to do fiction.'” In addition to Mary Elizabeth Williams and Larry Smith, the crowd included authors Hari Kunzru, Walter Mosley, and Elisha Cooper, along with agent Susan Golomb and editor Julie Grau.
(Brown was a staffer at Wired when I was freelancing for the magazine’s online division eleven years ago, and if I hadn’t been doing a speaking gig last weekend, I would’ve definitely come out for this; I’ve been looking forward to it for a while.)
Brown’s novel has become the latest inspiration for the argument over why so many books written by women about contemporary women’s experiences is branded as “chick lit.” Unsurprisingly, it’s NYT critic Janet Maslin who takes the oversimplistic critical short cut, although it should be noted that Maslin seems to be lazily conflating “chick lit” and “beach books” for the purposes of her review. In an interview with Jezebel, Brown challenges the tag:
“It is reductive! It’s also dismissive. ‘Chick lit’ is a catch all for everything that’s not ‘hard’ literature written by a woman. It implies that the male experience is universal, while the female experience is something only other women would be interested in. Even Joyce Carol Oates’ last book got the disembodied female head cover treatment! I understand where the term comes from – [books about] female protagonists looking for love in the big city – but my book has nothing to do with finding a man. Companies know that women are really the only ones who still buy books, which is good, but there has to be a better way to market them.”