An anonymous former editor recently took a big jab at chick lit and the women who write it in Boston’s Weekly Dig, a website devoted to culture and current affairs. Chick lit authors were not amused.
I will admit that I’m not the biggest chick lit fan. I loved Bridget Jones. I have indulged in the occasional Shopaholic book. But my tastes generally run towards more cerebral fare. That said, I think this editor is being a little hysterical and reactionary. Critics love to point to chick lit as a sign of cultural decline in this country, screeching about how Jennifer Weiner and Plum Skyes are pulling us downward into the abyss of anti-intellectualism. There’s no need to be quite so dramatic.
It doesn’t strike me as problematic that women are buying books by women and about women. That seems natural. If the argument is that all chick lit is inferior and therefore women shouldn’t be buying it, I disagree. Not all chick lit is brainless. There are many compelling and thoughtful titles available in the genre, and there’s also quite a bit of more challenging writing that gets lumped in with chick lit simply because it centers on female characters and desires. I also don’t believe that all the female readers in this country are only reading chick lit. They’re reading headier literature, too. You can’t go to a party these days without someone telling you how much they loved The Kite Runner or The Year of Magical Thinking. I would actually argue that chick lit is the gateway drug to more complex reading. The woman who buys Bergdorf Blondes today may buy Never Let Me Go tomorrow. If I thought American women were exclusively reading chick lit at the expense of all the other literature available, I might be concerned, but this just isn’t the case.
As for blaming the chick lit authors themselves for denigrating literature and the general dumbing down of women in our culture, I think that’s unfair. They are writers telling stories that they enjoy, and readers are responding to those stories. I do sigh when I go into a bookstore and see whole shelves dominated by pink and green pastel covers with cutesy drawings of shopping bags. I don’t think these books always represent the best in contemporary American fiction. But generalizing and demeaning an entire genre of writing that many women love and find meaningful doesn’t make any sense. Not all books have the responsibility to be great, enduring literature. Sometimes they can be just fun and escapist. I have to believe that savvy readers will eventually start to expect better quality writing and storylines from their chick lit, and the authors will respond in kind. Chick lit is not a sign of the apocalypse. Let’s not treat it as such.
