To Chick Lit Or Not To Chick Lit

Ever since Bridget Jones tottered in on her spiky shoes ten years ago, the merits of chick lit have been argued and debated among women writers on this here interweb. Oddly, I’ve never seen a debate over “serious” writers like Cormac McCarthy and, just for the hell of it, John Grisham, regarding the “merits” of law fluff and all its implications on contemporary literature. I mean that doesn’t get people all in a flurry. Where are the blogosphere debates about why one sells so much less than the other and who out there is complaining about the lack of literary merit in “male”-centric popular fiction?

And yet, we (the royal we, the “women” we) seem to be unable, as a group to just let each other write whatever the hell we feel needs to be written. It’s like taking the school yard chatter of the popular girls (the non-chick lit writers) and consistently forcing the less-than-popular girls (the chick lit writers) to eat at the table next to the cafeteria while pointing and laughing at them. Is a chick lit author any less of a writer because her cover is pink and maybe features shoes in a stunningly sexy way? I don’t think so…oh, and isn’t that baby pink lettering I spy on the cover of This Is Not Chick Lit? To me, it all just sounds like people are upset more about how popular chick lit has become more than anything: the whole idea that if everyone in middle Canada or America is reading The Devil Wears Prada that must mean the book is crap, because the masses are always wrong with a capital “W” when it comes to culture.

Yet, I think that championing women writers, of all kinds, is important, especially in the day and age where less books are being read by less people, and it becomes harder and harder to find good fiction no matter what side of the debate you end up on. I’ll read Jennifer Weiner in an afternoon and cry my eyes out, and then pick up something heftier the next day and have an equally enjoyable experience. There’s room in my cafeteria for all kinds of writing and I don’t see why one has to make the very important point of crying in all caps that you are, by definition, not a chick lit anthology helps matters any. Seems to me that the editor is simply trying to draw attention to herself by abusing the very thing she purports not to be, and that’s the worst kind of attention. How to make yourself feel better by putting other people down, now, isn’t that first sign of not having enough self-confidence? How very Mean Girls of her.

In short, me thinks the pink doth protest too much. Proclaiming to be the “best” of anything makes me cringe, I mean, not even Google lets you use that word in an ad because nowadays it means absolutely nothing.