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February 4, 2008 11:26 AM

Um, what *is* chick lit, exactly?

The marvellous Maureen Johnson is currently guest blogging at teen fiction site, insideadog and introduced the new blog by her agent, Daphne Unfeasible. Funny and full of excellent advice, I immediately subscribed. (Thanks, Luisa!)

Of course it wasn't long before the subject of chick lit was broached. In response to a question from a reader and aspiring writer, Daphne wrote the following:

To be brutally honest, I see no problem in the term "chic lit," or "chick lit," or whatever else they choose to call it. Young women's fiction, if you will. Pink covers, pictures of shoes, female protagonists having existential crises over glasses of chardonnay. But some have decided that description is deader than last season's flats, so we come up with synonyms. "Witty women's fiction" is one. "Upscale commercial fiction" works just as well.

In general, I like my fiction smart and funny. It doesn't need to fall strictly in the confines of what some would term chick lit -- one of the best novels I read last year was Lisa Lutz's The Spellman Files, and that fits no one's idea of chick lit. It's less about sticking my interests in a single category than being interested in original stories with intriguing characters, for a relatively young, commercial audience.

There are a couple of things that interest me about this. Firstly, I've recently been asked elsewhere to define chick lit and ... I can't. Apart from that it will probably (but not definitely - see Lisa Jewell's A Friend of the Family) have a female main character with a relatively snarky tone, I think the genre has widened enough that you can't set any parameters on story, setting, age of characters, anything ... particularly not the wine they drink or shoes they wear. The best I could come up with was that I know chick lit when I see it (which isn't at all helpful to anyone else, of course). Which brings me to my second point...

I also loved The Spellman Files and, while reading it, kept asking myself whether it was chick lit. I think it does fit the genre to a certain extent - snarky heroine, challenging romantic relationships and even more challenging family members - but I still struggled to decide whether to review it as chick lit or not. Eventually I decided that if Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum series is chick lit (and I think it is) then so is The Spellman Files.

What do you think?

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Posted by Keris on February 4, 2008 in Opinion | Permalink

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