Some books are the perfect read for a breezy summer day, while others may require more concentrated attention. In the last decade, fiction falling into the first category which have female protagonists are often labeled “chick lit,” while novels fitting the second category strive to be considered “literature.” Over the next several weeks, Fictionista Workshop will consider chick lit and its place on our collective bookshelves through a series of interviews, essays and conversations about this new genre.
Love it or hate it, chick lit has become a label for a body of modern fiction. Join us for a look at this phenomenon and its impact upon writers and readers.
We begin this series with a discussion between American author Alisa Kwitney and Canadian author Robyn Harding as they answer questions about why they love the genre, if not its moniker.
A Chick By Any Other Name: Does Chick Lit Need to be Re-Branded?
Horror. Mystery. Science Fiction. Romance. Chick lit. Among all these other genre names, “chick lit” stands out. It is clever, breezy and evocative of a certain happy fluffiness. But does the very name “chick lit” keep readers and critics from taking a book seriously? Authors Alisa Kwitney and Robyn Harding answer ten questions about chick lit and why they love the genre but not the name.
Q: When you began writing, did you set out to write a chick lit novel?
AK: Back in 1991, when my first novel was published, I don’t think the term had been coined. That was a long time ago, back before everyone had cell phones and surfed the internet, back when Mel Gibson was still insanely attractive but not openly insane. These days, a coming of age novel about a college freshman which deals with issues of food, weight and romance would be called chick lit. Back then, it was called “a comedy of manners” and was actually reviewed in the Sunday New York Times.
RH: When I wrote my first novel, The Journal of Mortifying Moments, I didn’t think about genre. I didn’t think about how my book would be marketed, where it would ultimately reside in the book store, or what color the cover would be. I just wanted to tell a story with heart and humor; a story that would be fun to read and fun to write.
Q: So when did you first discover that what you were writing was considered chick lit?
RH: In 2003, I sent my manuscript off to every fiction publisher in Canada (I’m Canadian), and within a few short months, I received rejection letters from all of them. According to these soul-destroying letters, Canadian publishers weren’t interested in commercial fiction. But when I submitted my manuscript in the US and the UK, I was immediately met with more interest. On the same day, I had calls from an editor in London and an agent in New York. They were both excited about my manuscript because “chick lit” was such a hot genre.
AK: My second novel, The Dominant Blonde, was written as a cross between a romance and a scuba diving caper. My natural tone tends toward dark humor, so when I was describing it, I called it “Carl Hiaasen on estrogen.” But when I submitted it, Avon said they thought the book could fit into their new trade paperback program. Somewhere along the line, I discovered that my book was now part of the chick lit flock.
Q: How did you feel about being labeled chick lit?
AK: I didn’t mind at all. I was a comic book editor, and I’ve always been a big fan of genre “I read romance, science fiction, horror, fantasy and mystery, as well as literary fiction. And my father was a science fiction author back when SF was considered pulpy trash. So I was thrilled to discover that my book happened to be part of a new genre that was both popular and clever.
RH: I was excited to be a part of this hot new trend. (Actually, I was so excited to be published, that they could have labeled my book “dog’s vomit” and I would have been okay with it.)
Q: Was there a downside to having your books published as chick lit?
RH: Around the time The Journal of Mortifying Moments hit the shelves with its pink cover (2004), I noticed that there were a lot of other pink books out there. Perhaps it was this saturation that led to something of a chick lit backlash. Suddenly, the term had become an insult. The genre was sniffed at by critics and journalists who dismissed it as mind numbing fluff. I soon realized that books with a female protagonist, a sense of humor and a pink cover, were somewhat marginalized.
AK: When chick lit was booming, there were a lot of lookalike covers on the shelves, and critics complained that the books all marched in downy yellow lockstep. In a cartoon from an English humor magazine, a picture of a Xerox machine was subtitled “Chick lit Author’s Writing Tool.”
But the truth was, there has always been a lot of variety in what gets called chick lit. The humor in chick lit could be clever and light or dark and raw. In some cases, of course, it could be facile and glib. Some of the books were better than others. Some of the books were wonderful. And, as in any genre, some entries were embarrassingly bad.
Most of the critics didn’t make any distinctions, because most of them didn’t bother to actually open the books and read them. In her 2007 New York Times column, Maureen Dowd wrote, “I took home three dozen of the working women romances. They can lull you into a hypnotic state with their simple life lessons “one heroine emulated Doris Day, another Audrey Hepburn, one was the spitting image of Carolyn Bessette, another Charlize Theron “but they’re a long way from Becky Sharp and Elizabeth Bennet. They’re all chick and no lit.”
In that column, Dowd claimed to have read the novels, but I saw no sentence that suggested that she had done more than glance at the covers and skim the back cover copy. If she had submitted that essay to a fifth grade teacher, it would have come back with a scrawled red pencil comment: Give specific examples.
Q: Publishing trends come and go, but the backlash against chick lit was particularly strong. Do you have any theories as to why so many critics and authors, many of them women, publicly disparage the genre?
RH: One of the best examples of this “dispute” is the battle of the anthologies. In 2006, an anthology was released called This Is Not Chick Lit, Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers. In the foreword, ironically entitled, “Why Chick Lit matters” editor Elizabeth Merrick writes that it’s okay to occasionally escape into “cotton candy entertainment.” She even admitted to (gasp) sporadically reading celebrity gossip magazines when she’s trying to pass time on the treadmill. But she also said that chick lit is formulaic, full of stock characters, “numbs the senses” and “reduces the complexity of the human experience.” Worse still, the genre was taking readers away from female writers of literary fiction who were more intelligent, thought provoking, and challenging, and who, obviously, were contributing short stories to her anthology.
In response, another anthology was released. This one was entitled: This Is Chick Lit (to be read with heavy emphasis on the Is, I’m sure). The editor of this book, Lauren Baratz-Logsted admitted that her anthology was “born out of anger”. Wasn’t it a shame, she wrote, that women were judging each other on what they were reading and what they were writing (though this sort of criticism dates back to1848 when Charlotte Brontë insulted Jane Austen’s work). In Baratz-Logsted’s opinion, reading was about entertainment, about escaping into a world with new friends, new relationships and new problems to over come – all of which chick lit books provide. She also said that to her, there are only two kinds of books: good, well written stories and bad, poorly written stories.
One of the most vocal critics of the chick lit genre (and contributor to This Is Not Chick Lit) has to be Curtis Sittenfeld (author of Prep, American Wife… ). In her New York Times review of Melissa Banks’ new novel The Wonder Spot, Sittenfeld said that calling a female writer’s novel chick lit is catty, not unlike calling her a slut.
One theory I’ve heard to explain the antagonism between female commercial writers (chicks) and literary writers (lits) is this: literary writers envy commercial writers their sales, while commercial writers envy literary writers’ reviews and accolades.
AK: For years, women’s traditional art forms, such as quilting, were thought to be somehow lesser than male forms, such as crafting furniture. Traditionally female occupations, such as nursing, were undervalued. Most early women novelists were derided as “scribblers,” and I think it’s been subconsciously ingrained in us that traditionally male pastimes are somehow more acceptable than traditionally female ones. Otherwise, why would violent thrillers receive less derision than romantic and domestic novels?
Q: Is there a good definition of chick lit? What is a chick lit novel?
AK: In the beginning of the nineties, most novels labeled “chick lit” employed a first person, humorous voice and a heroine in her twenties or thirties who works in publishing, and contains tales of domestic and romantic misadventure.
(As an aside, this need not damn the whole genre as derivative pap. The classic detective novel employs a hard-boiled, first person voice and a hero in his thirties who works as a private eye, and contains tales of domestic and romantic misadventure, along with some crime and violence. Classic horror and science fiction novels tend to have elements in common, as well.)
In any case, chick lit’s coming of age and “first job in the big city” novels were quickly joined by novels about women grappling with marriages, childbearing, midlife crises, betrayal and divorce. Sometimes the books were dubbed “hen-lit,” when the heroines were older; male writers’ domestic and romantic satires were termed “lad-lit.” But by and large, after 1998 or so, chick lit became a blanket term for almost any book written by a woman, provided it contained elements of humor and domestic drama.
RH: I agree that initially, chick lit described novels about a young woman trying to come into her own; find Mr. Right, the perfect job and lose 10 pounds. But I’ve written about murder, betrayal, divorce, midlife crises, and the struggle to raise a family. But I do so with a sense of humor. And I’m a woman. To many people, that makes me a chick lit author.
Q: So when is chick lit not chick lit?
AK: At this point, so many different kinds of books are called “chick lit” that I feel like everything is chick lit, and nothing is. I read an article about Eastern European and Indian and Scandinavian chick lit and how many of these novels deal with issues of rape and oppression. I have to say, there is something that feels very odd about calling a book “chick lit” if it deals with serious subjects in a serious manner – even if the author also uses humor.
RH: Ultimately, it’s the publisher who determines whether a book falls into the chick lit category. They choose the cover, the marketing, and the placement in the bookstore. My latest book, Chronicles of a Midlife Crisis is split between two narrators: one male, one female. And yet, it has a bra on the cover. (I’m not complaining. It’s a very nice bra.)
Q: Why do so many chick lit writers seem obsessed with Jane Austen?
AK: I think it’s tokenism. Jane Austen is the token domestic/romantic author who is granted literary status. But while Austen is wonderful, she is not the only sign of intelligent life in the romantic universe. There are other good writers out there who are concerned with romance and marriage but are not facile or shallow.
RH: I think a lot of us are obsessed with Dorothy Parker: her wit and intelligence.
AK: I love Dorothy Parker!
Q: Do male “lad lit” writers get treated differently than female “chick lit” writers?
AK: Absolutely. I’ve heard it said that if you want to write chick lit or romance and become a best-seller, write it under a man’s name and have somebody die. And even though I loved a certain current best seller, that axiom did occur to me when I read it.
RH: Nick Hornby is probably the quintessential “lad lit” writer, but based on his critical and commercial success, the label isn’t looked down on like its feminine counterpart. With women’s light fiction, we’ve got labels up the yin yang: Mommy lit, hen lit, knit lit, Christian lit, bride lit, widow lit, ethnic lit, and mystery chick lit. It’s the same with films. A female driven comedy is a “chick flick”. A male driven comedy is… a comedy. It makes me wonder why women are subject to so many labels when men are not.
Q: Does Chick Lit need to be rebranded?
AK: I don’t know. Sometimes I think we should embrace the “chick lit” label with a rebel “Dixie Chicks” spirit, and wear the downy yellow mantle with pride. At other times I think that the problem with labels is that they are, by definition, limiting. Interestingly enough, in the UK, where chick lit never went out of fashion the way it did in the US, a lot of reviewers no longer use the term.
At the end of the day, though, I did just decide to join a chick lit themed Facebook group because I knew I would meet kindred spirits.
RH: I know that these labels come down to marketing, which I totally get. What I don’t get are the sneers, the snubs and the condescension. Why is women’s humor so devalued? And what’s wrong with wanting to be uplifted by a book or a film, to see the comedy in even the most dramatic situations? But when a reader emails me and says I made her laugh, or cry, or she felt like I understood what she’s going through, I don’t care about being labeled. I’m just happy to be a writer.
To learn more about Alisa Kwitney, visit www.alisakwitney.com.
To learn more about Robyn Harding, visit www.robynharding.com.
