Trashionista: Do chick lit readers really only read chick lit?

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January 27, 2008 10:51 AM

Do chick lit readers really only read chick lit?

Yep, I'm on my high horse again. Neighhhhh!

I just read the following in a Financial Times review of The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby:

[R]ailing against chick-lit, [Jacoby] announces that “in the early sixties, girls headed for the Ivy League were reading Mary McCarthy and Philip Roth, not novels crafted by writers who were still in their teens or barely out of them”.

Thankfully (and, frankly, rather surprisingly), the FT describes this as "cobwebbed snobbery", but it once again raises the question Diane asked in her Guardian column last March - why do people assume that chick lit readers only read chick lit?

Related posts: Old timey chick lit bashing | More Maureen Dowd | If it's good it can't be chick lit

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Posted by Keris on January 27, 2008 in Opinion | Permalink

Comments

SO WHAT that they were reading Roth and McCarthy? Does that make them better readers, better human beings??
I hate Philip Roth's books anyway. Thanks for quoting me, and on my b/day too! ;) x

Posted by: diane shipley | January 27, 2008 9:56 PM

I am a chick lit reader and writer, and if you were to look at my bookshelf you'd know in an instant that my passion for literature certainly doesn't end and begin with chick lit. And so what if it did? At least I actually read. Anything.

Posted by: Lucie Simone | January 28, 2008 3:56 PM

"Amen" to fellow chick-lit fans and "boo, hiss" to Ms. Jacoby! Perhaps women in the early sixties - whether bound for the Ive League or not - were not as fed up with reality as today's women. I read chick-lit for a lift, a "happy ending" break (usually) from the world. My bookshelf is a wonderful mix - chick lit, mysteries, classics, inspirational fiction, non-fiction, even some westerns - and what I pick depends on my mood. Curses to Ms. Jacoby and anyone else who says I can only have one interest - that there can only be one me.

Posted by: Tami | January 29, 2008 1:19 AM