Chick Lit, or How Fiction Fits Us

The point of writing about a type of fiction is usually to define a category, but if that’s what you expect to read here, you will be disappointed. Chick Lit is one of those slippery categories: you could argue that it’s just a recent phenomenon, that relates only to younger women of the nineties and the first decade of the 21st century. But having read authors writing about women’s lives from the earliest periods of literature (Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders comes to mind, along with the Brontes and Jane Austen) I would say that the term is both a commercial category: it’s worth noting the similar girly designs on the covers and the graphic content of the stories. In my mind it is also a general all-purpose term: reading aimed at women. What I have been reading lately is an extension of the reading that I did as a much younger woman, but the types of stories have changed as much as my life is different from my mother’s.

The type of Chick Lit that gets all the hype is mostly recent, and most of the women reflect real lives that I see around me. But my taste runs to fewer wedding dramas and fashion victims and more to serious considerations of women in changing circumstances. For example, Diane Hammond’s Going To Bend is a wonderful story about two women who run a small soup business while dealing with the ordinary things that fill women’s lives in 2007: divorce, dating, surviving and overcoming financial obstacles, and making places for themselves in the life of a small town. Chelsea author Laura Kasischke’s Be Mine takes on the topic of a woman given the freedom to act at will, who discovers the perils of intimacy both with spouse and friends, with a plot that brings you to an unexpected finish. I like Kasischke’s novel much better than Katrina Kittle’s The Kindness of Strangers, which covers similar ground but with less subtlety and more need for accepting its grim view of parenting and female friendship. Another novel that uncovers the pitfalls of living in a world where marriages fall apart and kids are damaged is Ayelet Waldman’s Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, a story told by a woman who is having a hard time adjusting to stepmothering and ultimately sees her own missteps very clearly as she tries to rectify the problems of the past and make a good bond with her stepson. While none of these authors might wish to be assigned the Chick Lit tiara, these books bring readers into the minds of women who are perhaps a bit older, who have gotten beyond the rituals of younger years and who know what they know about romance, child rearing, and the vicissitudes of friendship.

Another category of Chick Lit covers female angst using broad humor to seduce the world-weary reader. For example, Kris Radish’s hilarious book, Annie Freedman’s Fabulous Traveling Funeral, takes a group of women who have been called together by the death of a friend. Lost to them now, Annie has arranged a trip to various places that she found significant and plots that they will become a gang that fills the void left by her with a celebration of all the stages of a woman’s life. It’s a wonderful read that is cheerful, and reminds us of the joy of women friends, despite the obvious loss and grief they share. Radish was introduced to me by my pal Ilah, and I’m glad she brought it to my attention. I plan to read her other novels on the basis of AFFTF. Another wonderful read is Melanie Lynne Hauser’s Confessions of A Super Mom, whose heroine Birdie shuffles along the divorce trail while dealing with life’s troubles with an impressive inventory of superpowers that would make any mother smile appreciatively. Finally, though the characters of Martina Lewycka’s A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian are British, the sisters who are trying to keep their father, an author who is writing the book of the title, while falling prey to a Ukranian woman whose character is, well, questionable. This is a great read for anyone who has reached the stage in life where parents are more like children, and children have to become parents to their elders.

Another sub-category of women’s books is historical fiction, and there are many examples, too many for discussion here, though the novels of Phillipa Gregory, Ellen Cooney, and others seem to fit a particular kind of reader. I will address them in time, but for now, lets just say that some historical accounts seem particularly designed for women. Then there is the cozy mystery, more like chick lit in that its particulars seem addressed to female sensibilities, with practitioners like Janet Evanovich, Rita Mae Brown, and many others.

One final note: those customers who have been at Cranesbill have noticed that for about the last year, current chick books have been located with the romance novels apart from the other literary fiction. Sometimes this dividing gets a bit murky. Undaunted, this continues as a conscious effort on my part to make a section where women’s stories could be corralled in one set of shelves. I have emphatically moved books that I felt belonged with a adult woman-friendly type of storytelling. Now you may think of romances as bodice rippers, featuring fabulously handsome heroes who are pursued and pursuing. And here’s where the “fiction fits us” part comes in: women read everything these days, and there is no intent on my part to suggest that we should prioritize serious fiction and let go of that other embarrassing stuff. What stories do is to pull us in and get us to become a part of the story world. What unites reading writing by women is a point of view that comes with the territory.

The value, as always with reading, is sensing the familiar and learning more about human beings, who are fallible and crazy at times, but for whom we develop an affection because of all that.