Recently I mooched a copy of This Is Not Chick Lit edited by Elizabeth Merrick. It’s a collection of short stories by woman writers. Writers who are generally ignored because the spotlight is shining on their Chick Lit-spweing sisters. It arrived today and it made my Monday. I’ve been wanting to read this collection for ages. I dug in right away tonight skipping to the stories by Aimee Bender and Francine Prose. It has done this body good, reading these women.
I loathe Chick Lit. I loathe it as much as I loathed The Shitty, Shitty Wedding. Chick Lit along with John Grisham and Stephen King (sorry Kelly) is the reason I can’t go into a Barnes & Noble without collapsing into an apoplectic rage. Why? Because if you ever go to Barnes & Noble to buy a book you can only buy four kinds of books:
John Grisham Books
Stephen King Books
Chick Lit
And Oprah’s Bookclub Books
The only thing Barnes & Noble is good for is magazines and the chance to see cute booknerds.
For a long time I thought cheez-dog Chick Lit was my secret guilty pleasure having enjoyed books like Bridget Jones’s Diary and Good in Bed. I guess I have a think for books about chubby girls trying to figure shit out. But the more Chick Lit I read, the angrier I got. Until, after reading the absolutely horrible Nanny Diaries, I had to give it up for good or fear having some sort of fury-induced aneurysm.
Of course that does not stop every woman I know from trying to shove Chick Lit down my bitter, single-woman throat. If I had $1 for all the people who told me to read The Devil Wears Prada or some Shopaholic book, I could buy all of those books and burn them. It would be a glorious, self-righteous fire and I would warm my cold, judgmental heart by it’s flame.
I could never quite get these women to understand why I wanted none of their Chick Lit nonsense. A lot of times they just brush off my poo-pooing of their book recommendations claiming that they don’t know because they’re not “writers.” Apparently in the land Chick Lit readers that I know only “writers” like non-Chick Lit books. Of course I never think to ask them about the “writers” who write their favorite books.
Until tonight, I could never quite put my disdain for Chick Lit into words. I could always fumble my way to predictable, boring, and pointless. But when put on the spot I could never find the words to make them see. Now I don’t have to, because I can just quote Merrick’s introduction:
“Chick lit’s formula numbs our senses. . . Where chick lit reduces the complexity of the human experience, literature increase our awareness of other perspectives and paths. Literature employs carefully crafted language to expand our reality, instead of beating us over the head with cliches that promote a narrow worldview.”
i totally, totally agree with your assesment. i hate walking into B&N and seeing tables of cartoon covered chick lit. it’s gotten so bad that you can’t tell one book from the other. chick lit needs to be taken out back and put out of it’s misery.
i don’t agree with not being able to find good books at B&N. i picked up jeremy irons reads “lolita” and a cute little young adult titled “stay with me”. and i’d buy from B&N before i’d by from Amazon, but that’s just because i like the store.
i think lots of people confuse women writers with chick lit and i don’t think that’s the case. nicholas sparks is total chick lit. but i don’t think harry potter is. i think that chick lit and mass paperbacks are one in the same.
and yeah, let’s start a fire.
Lolita is a classic, B&N always has the classics. But I dare you to go find something like oh, the Pornographer’s Poem or My Sister’s Continent, or hell a book of Mary Gaitskill short stories at Barnes & Noble. I bet you can’t find any of that, because it’s all SK, JG, Chick Lit, Harry Potter and other essential Bullshit.
I’ve heard the next Potter book will be called:
“Harry Potter and the Sequel of Profitability”
Hey now, what did Stephen ever do to you?
Just kidding. What offends me is that you put King’s name next to Grisham. *shiver.*
Hey now, Stephen King addressed his style in the book “It”. He had one character, Bill Denbrough, closely mirror his beginnings: After having a writing assignment evicerated by a teacher who wrote that it was “crap” and “pulp”, he submitted the same story to a men’s magazine where it was lauded and published immediately, even paying him $200 for it.
He also had the character immersed in the middle of a 70 minute discussion about one “important story” (about a cow’s examination of a discarded engine block in a deserted field, possibly after a nuclear war) in which the author of the story insists that the vigneete is a socio-political statement in the manner of the early Orwell. Most of the class–and the instructor–agrees, but still the discussion drones on. King has his character say, “I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand any of this. Why does a story have to be socio-anything? Politics… culture… history… aren’t those the natural ingredients of any story, if it’s told well? I mean…can’t you guys just let a story be a story?”
I guess I agree in a way. Popcorn trash novels have their place just as the more important works do. Is that so bad?
I’m not arguing the merits of King’s writing (I’ll let Kelly do that). I’m just saying that B&N stocks so many of his books that you can’t find anything else, and really this wasn’t supposed to be about that.
I’m saying Chick Lit is bad and was women we should boycott it. That’s what I’m talking about.
And I concur 100% on oogie chick lit. Except for Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books. But that’s it.
And there’s no argument about the merits of King’s writing 🙂