Chick lit

"Chick lit" is a term used to denote genre fiction written for and marketed to young women, especially single, working women in their twenties and thirties. The genre's creation was spurred on, if not exactly created, by Sue Townsend's Adrian Mole diaries which inspired Adele Lang's Confessions of a Sociopathic Social Climber: The Katya Livingston Chronicles in the mid-1990s. Another strong early influence can be seen in the books by M. C. Beaton about Agatha Raisin and Hamish Macbeth. The style can also be seen to be somewhat influenced by female teen angst movies like Sixteen Candles and Clueless. Later with the appearance of Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and similar works; the genre continued to sell well in the 2000s, with chick lit titles topping bestseller lists and the creation of imprints devoted entirely to chick lit.

The genre

Chick lit features hip, stylish female protagonists, usually in their twenties and thirties, in urban settings (usually London or Manhattan), and follows their love lives and struggles for professional success (often in the publishing, advertising, public relations or fashion industry). The books usually feature an airy, irreverent tone and frank sexual themes. The genre spawned Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City and its accompanying television series. Popular Chick lit novelists include Ireland's Marian Keyes, and Sophie Kinsella author of the Shopaholic series. Variations have developed to appeal to specific audiences, such as "Chica Lit," aimed at English-dominant, middle-class American Latinas, the top-seller being novelist and film writer/producer Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez; Christian Chick Lit, Matron Lit (aka Hen Lit) for middle-aged women, Young Adult Chick Lit (also Teen Lit), and the novels of Emmy-winning author Lori Bryant-Woolridge, known for her chick lit novels (Read Between the Lies, Hitts and Mrs., Mourning Glo) written specifically with women of color in mind.

Connotations of the term "chick lit"

"Chick" is an American slang term for young woman and "Lit" is short for "literature". In the USA, the term "chicklit" is also a pun on Chiclets, a popular brand of chewing gum in the USA.

However, the genre has also been claimed as a type of post-feminist fiction which covers the breadth of the female experience which deals unconventionally with traditional romantic themes of love, courtship and gender.

The male equivalent, spearheaded by authors like Ben Elton, Mike Gayle, and Nick Hornby, has been referred to as "lad lit" and "dick lit".

One of the first uses of the term was in the title of the 1995 anthology Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction, edited by Cris Mazza and Jeffrey DeShell. The work in this anthology was not chick lit as we know it today, and the term was used ironically. However James Wolcott's 1996 article in The New Yorker "Hear Me Purr" co-opted "chick lit" to define the trend of "girlishness" evident in the writing of female newspaper columnists at that time. This is significant, as major chick lit works such as Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City originated in such columns. With the success of Bridget Jones and Sex and the City in book form, the chick lit boom began. The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank is regarded as one of the first chick lit works to originate as a novel (actually a collection of stories), though the term "chick lit" was in common use at the time of its publication (1999). The term "chick lit" was in general use by 2000-2001.

The variant "chic lit" has recently been used for works such as Plum Sykes's Bergdorf Blondes (2004), set in the world of fashionable East Coast Society.

Another term is "Chiction" (sometimes "Chicktion"), which first came into wider use in 2006. It has a similar connotation (fiction with romantic themes), but is not restricted to modern literature, so it can apply to classic novels from Jane Austen onwards.

Quotations about chick lit

"To suggest that another woman's ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut -- doesn't the term basically bring down all of us?" -- Curtis Sittenfeld in the New York Times [1]

"Chick lit claims to be representative of women’s lives, their hopes, fears, dreams and values. But it’s actually about white, upper-middle-class American and Western European women. Chick-lit defenders like to point out that there is black and Latina chick lit, chick lit for older women, but this is all tokenism—a chance for women of every color and age to be portrayed as annoying, shallow twits. Just like George W. claims to be a regular Joe, chick lit claims to be the story of the Everywoman, when really, it’s the story of Some Women of a Certain Class. Which is pretty ironic, given that chick-lit authors cry elitism more often than their characters accidentally trip on their own designer shoes and fall into tall, handsome strangers." -- Anonymous Chick lit editor in Boston's Weekly Dig [2]

Major scandals

In April 2006, 19-year-old Harvard College sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan faced a major scandal when it was discovered that her chick lit novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life", published by Little, Brown and Co. had lifted major portions from several other chick lit books, most notably Megan McCafferty’s "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings". Plagiarized passages were also found of Salman Rushdie's and Meg Cabot's work. Significantly, Kaavya had received a $500,000 advance for her first book, with plans for another. Her publishers were so embarrassed that on May 4 2006, they recalled all unsold copies of the book with plans to destroy them, and called off the second book deal. The movie studio also stopped pre-production and dropped her movie project based on the book.

Movie adaptations

External links