Oh, Maureen Johnson, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…
So when everyone was debating about “Chick Lit,” I was probably off eating a sandwich somewhere and missed the whole thing. Which was fine by me. Except that I kept getting these interview questions over and over again, people asking me about my favorite “fellow Chick Lit writers” or how I felt about something “as a Chick Lit writer.”
::snip::
The only thing I really did know was that a lot of people spoke derisively of Chick Lit, basically using it as a synonym for trash and often connecting it to the word “mindless”. I heard there was a whole book dedicated to NOT being Chick Lit, and that Gloria Steinem was quoted on the cover and everything.
Why was everyone lumping me in with this? What a conundrum! I figured I’d better ask around and get more information.
“It’s your covers,” someone told me. “It’s because the girls have no heads. Well, they have heads, but they don’t have tops of heads.”
I wrote this down.
“It’s the romance,” someone else said.
I wrote this down.
“It’s the light, breezy tone you adopt,” said someone else. “Humor.”
I wrote this down.
Unlike Maureen, I have actually described myself as a chick lit author because my SSG books are about a young woman’s journey to self-discovery and adopt a breezy, humorous tone. They also feature covers sans heads (or pink, and yes, I got letters saying “I don’t usually read pink books, but I loved yours!”), a healthy smattering of romance (you know, like The Matrix), and of course, is about and written by a woman. That’s the real issue here.
Like Maureen, I have been told that my book are not chick lit, because they don’t contain that holy triumvirate of chick lit stereotypes: shoes, cities, shopping:
Someone else told me that Chick Lit is about shopping, but I don’t write about shopping. And yet . . . I am Chick Lit. Yet another person told me it was about sassy young women in the city, which I never wrote about until Suite Scarlett. And yet, I am Chick Lit. Person number fifty-seven told me it was something about women who work for magazines, which I have never written about. And yet, I am Chick Lit.
And I’ve also been asked about the shoes, cities, and shopping in my books, by people who have obviously never read them. In fact, when my first book came out, it was promoted by someone who said, “I don’t read ‘shoe’ books myself, but this one looks interesting.”I think the word “shoe” may appear once in my novel.
So my problem was not calling my books chick lit, it was the fact that my definition of chick lit (i.e., “humorous story about young woman’s journey towards self-discovery told in a light, snarky tone”) did not match the stereotype everyone was deriding. When your definition of a word differs from everyone else’s, you’re in trouble. This is how I felt when people started referring to “floppy disks” as the hard ones, instead of the seriously floppy disks I used to use in my Texas Instruments LOGO.
Though since Pantalaimon the laptop only has drives for “discs” and not “disks” then I suppose the point is moot. My brother tells me that USB is the way to go anyway and something about Apple Air Jordan, but I digress.
The point is, it’s difficult to have a conversation wherein the people involved are defining the terms of the topic differently. Yesterday, SB and I saw a bumper sticker: “You say PIT BULL like it’s a bad thing.” I feel that way, and have for years.
Keris Stainton of Trashionista writes:
I’ve recently been asked elsewhere to define chick lit and … I can’t. Apart from that it will probably (but not definitely – see Lisa Jewell’s A Friend of the Family) have a female main character with a relatively snarky tone, I think the genre has widened enough that you can’t set any parameters on story, setting, age of characters, anything … particularly not the wine they drink or shoes they wear. The best I could come up with was that I know chick lit when I see it (which isn’t at all helpful to anyone else, of course). Which brings me to my second point…
I also loved The Spellman Files and, while reading it, kept asking myself whether it was chick lit. I think it does fit the genre to a certain extent – snarky heroine, challenging romantic relationships and even more challenging family members – but I still struggled to decide whether to review it as chick lit or not. Eventually I decided that if Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum series is chick lit (and I think it is) then so is The Spellman Files.
But genre is damn slippery, even at the best of times, as pointed out recently by Justine Larbalestier, David Moles, and Maureen Johnson (in the same post as above: “If established literary terms are stable as jello molds, then Chick Lit is a soufflé sitting on a fault line. It only means whatever the latest and most effective argument says it means. Or whatever you guess it means. Or whatever Wikipedia says it means. Whether the books under the banner are in any way similar (except for the sex of their authors) . . . well, that’s another question.”)
To be brutally honest, I see no problem in the term “chic lit,” or “chick lit,” or whatever else they choose to call it. Young women’s fiction, if you will. Pink covers, pictures of shoes, female protagonists having existential crises over glasses of chardonnay. But some have decided that description is deader than last season’s flats, so we come up with synonyms. “Witty women’s fiction” is one. “Upscale commercial fiction” works just as well.
Lately, when people ask me what I write, I tell them I write a series about a girl who joins a secret society at her Ivy League University, and it’s kind of like Bridget Jones. They’ve heard of Bridget Jones, because there was a movie.
(Seriously, though, how funny would it be if I said it was kind of like The Other Boleyn Girl, Stardust, and No Country For Old Men? I’m occasionally tempted to be dadaist, because cocktail parties in DC can get a bit predictable. There was a period of time where I started telling people I was a professional smoke jumper, but then Sailor Boy threatened to lock me in the house.)
I did an interview a while back where all roads led back to this discussion of chick lit, of the value of chick lit, and, like Maureen said, how I feel about such-and-such “as a chick lit writer.” (It even went so far as to make a bizarre claim that the unicorn book, a young adult fantasy adventure with gorings, decapitations, and extended hunting sequences, was “chick lit.” Someone picking it up expecting Bridget Jones’s Diary is going to be pissed.)
I don’t do the genre snobbery thing. Good books, bad books, all over the place. There are genres that aren’t my cup of tea, but I’ve pretty much learned never to say never on that one, because one will presently come along to make a liar out of me and I’ll adore it. And, like Maureen, I’m fine with being called a chick lit writer, because I do think the SSG books work as I define the term. And I’m fine with not being called a chick lit writer because someone thinks books without shoes or shopping don’t count.
I’m not so much fine with calling the unicorn book chick lit though, since I don’t see it matching anyone’s definition of that term.
It’s more like Jellyfish Lit. (Sorry, Maureen.)
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