You think you know it when you see it. Perusing the shelves at your local bookstore, its spine pops out from amongst the dreary-hued classics and the jewel-toned bestsellers. Like a wild animal hunting for food, your spine prickles when you see it: it will be pink (hot or baby), or pastel, or maybe white, with font either cleanly modern or whimsically cursive. The cover will be graced by a cartoon of an item of clothing, a picture of a girl, or some other cute little image.
You’ve found it: chick-lit.
Popular examples include: Bridget Jones’ Diary by Helen Fielding, Sex and the City by Candace Bushnell, anything by Sophie Kinsella (Shopaholic Series, Can You Keep a Secret?, The Undomestic Goddess, Twenties Girl, Remember Me?), The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weinberger (in addition to others such as Everyone Worth Knowing, and Chasing Harry Winston), Bergdorf Blondes by Plum Sykes, anything by Emily Giffin, anything by Madeleine Wickham…
You get the picture. Odds are, if you’re young, female, and enjoy reading, you’ve probably read one of the above (or one of their ilk) at one point.
But where do we draw the line at calling something chick-lit, and what are the true implications of calling something chick-lit?
Chick-lit is more than just a descriptor – it also evaluates. By labelling something as chick-lit, we, as a society, are expressing our opinion of the novel as irrelevant, devoid of intellectual weight, and fundamentally silly and unimportant. Is it any wonder that so many of these novels are written by, for, and about women? I really don’t think so.
I think that a lot of novels by young women are erroneously labelled as ‘chick-lit’, just because they happen to be written by and about young women. I won’t dispute that the novels that I listed above are not exactly worthy of inclusion in the canon of literature. I would, however, argue that they are certainly not worse than a great number of other books I’ve read that are considered to be literature. Bergdorf Blondes made me laugh, a lot. The Bishop’s Man made me want to smash my head in.
Like I hinted at above, there are novels that are well-written and intelligent, and are about young women that I feel should not be called chick-lit. I think that marketing and public perception have a great deal to do with this.
The front covers of all of Curtis Sittenfeld’s novels are great examples. They all look as though they are silly, fluffy, “women’s novels” (note: is there such thing as a “men’s novel”? They’re only ever called novels.), when they are anything but. They’re novels about women – women who are flawed, and young, and experiencing love, loss, insecurity, intense friendships: the whole gamut of life. They’re written in evocative, clear, lush prose and happen to involve boarding school, romances, college boyfriends, et cetera. They’re novels that should be marketed to everyone. And, yet, the front covers ensure that anyone glancing over them will walk away without a second look.
Tom Wolfe’s novel I Am Charlotte Simmons discusses a young woman at a big university, and deals with many of the same subjects as those addressed in Sittenfeld’s Prep and The Man of My Dreams. Tom Wolfe is exalted as one of the best authors of our times, when I would argue that I Am Charlotte Simmons was clunky, poorly written, and completely divorced from reality. It completely missed the mark that Sittenfeld hits spot-on.
It annoys me when books such as these are called chick-lit, because it presumes that they are worthless, but it also annoys me that we presume this worthlessness to begin with. Chicklitbooks.com tells us that:
The plots usually consist of women experiencing usual life issues, such as love, marriage, dating, relationships, friendships, roommates, corporate environments, weight issues, addiction, and much more…Chick lit is told in a more confiding, personal tone. It’s like having a best friend tell you about her life. Or watching various characters go through things that you have gone through yourself, or witnessed others going through.
So, what exactly about this spells worthless? Isn’t literature meant to explore life issues and remind us of what connects us all to one another? If women are searching for novels that deal with experiences that remind them of their own, and they can’t find them on the bestseller list, doesn’t it make sense that they would turn to a genre that prioritizes their life experiences?
Don’t get me wrong – much of chick-lit is not empowering. It paints women as materialistic and shallow, but doesn’t that tell us about the society it springs from? If women are writing about themselves this way, then this is how they’ve been taught to think about themselves; that, or they recognize that other women will respond to this characterization, so they’re laughing all the way to the bank.
I just think that there’s a great deal of hidden evaluative meaning to the label chick-lit, and that one must be very careful when using it – I know I will be.
