Hi, Lola,

Sorry. I knew I was skating on thin ice with my Jane Austent comment, and you are right to pull me up on it.

All this goes to highlight, as everyone else has already said in the pages I somehow missed when I came in last night, the problems of pigeonholing.

I am clearly the kind of person who responds to pigeonholing in exactly the way marketing people want us to. The trouble is,when there are so many books out there and only one lifetime in which to read them all, we need some method of streamlining so that hopefully we will all be reading the books that suit our individual tastes.

Is Maggie O'Farrell chick lit? Cos I read her book After You'd Gone and, although it was ok, I cannot ever put her and Austen in the same category. In fact, I can't really put anyone in the Austen category. She's on her own.

I am only saying how I respond to the term chick lit, and what it conjures up for me, and it suggests - though having read very little of it, I don't know - that it is about women looking for men and also that their lives are somehow incomplete without them. Ali McBeal used to wind me up for exactly that reason - she was an intelligent female lawyer, but utterly neurotic and insane because she didn't have a man, which, ultimately, doesn't do a lot for feminism.

Jane Austen wrote about the necessity of marriage for a woman and the importace of making a good marriage in order for women to live, because she wrote in a time when women had no choice but to be financially dependent on men. But she values, above everything else, integrity and sincerity, and exposes the tension between the fact that a woman (if she had no fortune) needed to be beautiful in order to find a husband and the artificiality of those characters whose value in the world was largely ornamental. Austen's novels are, frequently, comic attacks on society, rather than novels that maintain the status quo. In their plots they might be seen as chick lit, but in their themes and ideals they are serious and also highly feminist.

Is chick lit feminist?

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Sorry - it doesn't matter whether chick lit is feminist or not. The fact is, we should all just write what we want to write, and yes, we should all wear whatever badge we wear with pride.

Does anyone remember Ali Smith, when judging New Writing 13 complaining that the majority of entries by women were depressingly unadventurous, stuck in a domestic something-or-other? (I can't remember her exact words.)

Yes. She was completely misinterpreted. Here are her (and Toby Litt's) exact words, in the preface to New Writing 13:

On the whole the submissions from women were disappointingly domestic, the opposite of risk-taking - as if too many women writers have been injected with a special drug that keeps them dulled, good, saying the right thing, aping the right shape, and melancholy at doing it, depressed as hell.

The word 'domestic' sparked a furore, but she didn't mean 'women writers who confine themselves to a domestic setting' (such as Jane Austen, a writer she loves). She and TL were surely talking about writers compromising their own insight and spirit in order to be acceptable, to get published - part of what Scarlett Thomas is also talking about?

Frances

She and TL were surely talking about writers compromising their own insight and spirit in order to be acceptable, to get published

Hmmm. Having read the piece quoted, I'm not sure that is what she's saying. . . . . .

I've read 3 Marian Keyes books and enjoyed them all. The one I liked least (but still found very readable) was the book trade one which Lammi referred to maybe because I did get a sense of her getting things off her chest. Apart from Marian, I couldn't say that I'm a chick-lit reader. My objection is not the 'looking for a man' theme as that could be defined as 'looking for love' and for most people that's a fairly universal concern. What bothers me is the portrayal of incompetence in women as appealing and attractive. To be honest I find it a bit insulting to show women as clumsy, accident-prone, unable to cook, unable to manage their money so that they pay enormous money for shoes and are unable to pay their rent etc, etc. If something does go right in their lives, it's pure luck and circumstances rather than through the woman's own ability and skill. Instead to sorting themselves out they meet a man who is steady, wealthy and reliable and sorts out their probelms for them.
I may be guilty of generalising as I am not that widely read in terms of chick-lit but it's what bugged me the most about Bridget Jones.

What bothers me is the portrayal of incompetence in women as appealing and attractive

Yes. I agree, which is another reason why I love Austen.

Is Chick-Lit feminist?
Well, again there is a real mis-conception out there that chick lit is solely about shoes, and the need to find a man etc and yes- there is a portion of chick out there which remains a vapid as that. Just like there are dodgy literary fiction novels.

From my point of view, the strongest chick lit is that which shows strong women dealing with what life throws at them. Sometimes that means they have to fight to stay strong- sometimes that is while they are gaining weight and mismanaging their finances and dumping their boyfriends.
The thing about chick lit is that is deals with serious issues, but while remaining engaging enough to invite the reader in. It certainly is feminist- for the most part it deals with issues that affect us women living and working today (just as Jane Austen’s was in her day).

From postings elsewhere, I'm starting to wonder how my original comment about chick-lit is being interpreted. I wasn't meaning to suggest anything negative about the genre, the writers or the readers of that literary style. I was just remarking on misgivings I've always had about the term itself; misgivings that the article in the link seemed to reinforce.

Alex

Lola, do you have a definition of chick-lit? The Keyes' novel I read had a whole overtly feminist strand going through it about how certain men still find ways to exclude women from top jobs.

To me, the defining feature of chick-lit, aside from the fact it has a female lead, is that there's a happy ending and an element of romance. I never saw the ditsiness of the mc (or indeed posh shoes) as a key ingredient. There are novels like this but, as you say, I'd class them as a genre within a genre. Label-lit?

I'm starting to wonder how my original comment about chick-lit is being interpreted

I think we're all agreed on this: It's dangerous to pigeonhole, and I am clearly someone who has written off a load of stuff because of the term chick lit, purely because of my own mis/preconceptions of what kind of novel the term refers to.

So I guess Austen is chick lit, then. A female lead, addressing issues relevant to women of the time, an element of romance and a happy ending.

So it just goes to show that pigeonholing is simply a matter of simplifying something that is actually quite complex.

I find the 'strong woman' thing a difficult term, though.

I think the definition of Chick Lit is 'coming of age' stories about women. The women are usually 'real' - as in, not perfect (which is why some may be bad at certain things). The ending is usually hopeful, rather than happy. The romance is not always the driving force of the story.

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And the style is often chatty and light-hearted. I forgot that one!

I think Margaret Atwood defined herself as a writer of Chick Lit at one point...

By that definition I am. Quite a broad church, then.

I am clearly someone who has written off a load of stuff because of the term chick lit, purely because of my own mis/preconceptions of what kind of novel the term refers to.

Perhaps this illustrates some of the points of this thread - that some women (me included) are not attracted to the term "chicklit" and find it sounds a little derogatory and alienating and does not relate to the kind of way that we like to be seen as women.

And I would say also if the original article was accurate perhaps the women alienated by the term are not being catered for by publishers in the idea of what sort of experience/endings be reflected. I would not pick up a book with a pink cover. And yet maybe there is stuff within some of those covers that I would like?

Perhaps I could have some books suggested to me that I could try and see.

My next novel (paperback of Queen Mum) has a pink cover, ahem. So that's interesting, because I wondered what signals it would give off. The mc's someone who's coming to terms with the loss of a child and the main theme is about how we edit events to suit ourselves, though there's also something about our tv culture and about class. Does that constitute chick lit?

As Margaret Atwood pointed out in a 1998 speech, “To trace the trajectory of the novel is to follow the struggle of the novelist—even, perhaps especially, the male novelist—to be taken seriously—that is, to raise the perception of his chosen form from that of a piece of silly frou-frou to the higher, more male realm of capital-A Art.”

This is from an article called "Why Hemingway is Chicklit"
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2780/

Snowbell, in my opinion you can't beat Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes as an example of 'traditional' Chick Lit.

Bear in mind that this style of writing is designed to be accessible and 'easy-reading', if you see what I mean. It's not going to be to everyone's taste. I think the cover is red.

Lammi, I hope you don't mind but I've always thought of you as an author of Chick Lit. Bear in mind that I don't find the term remotely derogatory - it's just a slightly irritating label (coined by a man?) which stuck.

Just my opinion.

My book will probably have a pink cover and is unashamedly Chick Lit, and I'd say it's pretty much the book I wanted to write.

Sorry Kate. I didn't mean to say something that resonated with anyone's own work. But I suppose I am the kind of woman who finds the categorisation of women to do with clothes and girliness and pink very annoying and not me. However, I will look out for your book when it comes out in paperback as it doesn't exactly sound like a pink book. As I said I really like some of Margaret Forster - would she be encased in pink now?

Why are all women's books in pink? Why are all girls things in pink? My sister can't get anything for my niece that isn't pink.