The Trouble With Chick Lit

By Helaine Olen, AlterNet. Posted August 11, 2006.

It's hard to believe it has been a decade since we first met scrappy singleton Bridget Jones. Her semicomic everywoman trials and travails launched the modern publishing phenom of "chick-lit," in which twenty- and thirty-something women with lovable flaws hunt successfully for both the perfect man and the ultimate pair of designer heels.

Yet of all the things that might mark the 10th anniversary of "Bridget Jones's Diary," an anthology titled "This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers," edited by Elizabeth Merrick, might be the most unexpected gift of all.

"When 'Bridget Jones's Diary' came out in 1996, as a young woman writer, I was just elated," recalls Merrick, a New York author and writing instructor. "Then it just got harder and harder to find literary works by women."

The fictional empowerment of chick-lit heroines, it seems, comes with a real-life cost: less attention paid to serious women scribes. Merrick points out that as the Jonathans -- that's Jonathan Franzen, Jonathan Lethem, and Jonathan Safran Foer -- saw their careers take off for the literary stratosphere, many of their female contemporaries found their own work languishing, receiving less press and sales than their male counterparts.

All, that is, except for chick-lit writers. By 2004, Publishers Weekly was estimating more than 200 chick-lit tales were being published annually, even as women remained dismally unrepresented in literary magazines and op-ed pages.

Merrick, 33, is not the first to wonder about the effect of chick lit on women's writing. Over the past few years, novelists Francine Prose, Beryl Bainbridge and Doris Lessing have all attempted to take on the lack of respect they feel is accorded to serious writing by women. But Merrick and her inflammatory title touched a nerve in the collective conscious the others had not.

When Random House last year announced the forthcoming publication of "This Is Not Chick Lit," with contributions from such A-list writers as Jennifer Egan and Aimee Bender, the roar of outrage from the literary blogosphere was immediate. "We've got the country's (self-proclaimed) best women writers turning up their noses at their fellow women authors' more commercial efforts," wrote one of the most famous chick-lit authors of them all, Jennifer Weiner, whose works include the novels "Good in Bed" and "In Her Shoes."

This was, in some ways, a followup to a post Weiner had made on the popular lit blog Beatrice.com earlier in the year when she wrote, "The best chick-lit books deal with race and class, gender wars and workplace dynamics, not just shoes and shopping." As for more literary works, she noted their depressing insistence on exploring "death (often sudden), regret and disappointment (always permanent)."

Soon plans were announced for a competing anthology, "This Is Chick Lit," edited by Lauren Baratz-Logsted. "Where do these women get off naming themselves 'America's Best Women Writers?," she wrote on Beatrice.com. "The reason chick lit sells in such great abundance is that it provides readers with a reliable form of entertainment. Is there something wrong with this?"

Many say no, seeing positive qualities in the genre. "Women have professional opportunities they didn't have in earlier generations, but now women have to find a lasting personal relationship while running a corporation. The old demands on women have not disappeared," notes Suzanne Ferriss, an English professor and co-editor of the nonfiction anthology "Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction." "A lot of people say chick lit is escapist froth. We think they are wrong. It is trying to engage with real women's lives."

It is indeed true that many women -- myself included -- can viscerally identify with the problems chick-lit heroines face. I will never again sign up to deliver snacks to my son's school without thinking ruefully of Allison Pearson's "I Don't Know How She Does It," in which would-be mistress of the universe Kate Reddy finds herself smashing in store-bought mince pies in the middle of the night to make them look homemade. Nonetheless, the cry that chick lit deals with real women's concerns in a relatable way while literary fiction spins off into greater degrees of irrelevance is somewhat disingenuous.

First, it is not as though literary fiction doesn't -- at least some of the time -- trawl the same terrain as chick lit, though Weiner is not wrong when she says the stories tend to not end as happily. But perhaps more important, the formula of chick lit itself -- with its comedic farce and fantasy solutions to real-life problems -- ultimately undercuts its claim to social relevance. Super-consumer Becky of Sophie Kinsella's "Shopaholic" series never files for bankruptcy protection. Kate Reddy quits her job and moves to the country with her family only to find -- lo and behold -- a small toy factory in need of saving. Deus ex machina and coincidence reign in the world of modern gal fiction.

Helaine Olen has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon and other publications. She is an associate editor at LiteraryMama.com.

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