Not long after we featured the interview with Janelle Brown (and I'm talking hours, because it was only yesterday), I read an interview with her on Jezebel.
In response to "Because your novel has female protagonists and a baby blue cover, it seems that some people have categorized it as chick lit, which felt reductive to me", Janelle said:
It is reductive! It’s also dismissive. “Chick lit” is a catch all for everything that’s not “hard” literature written by a woman. It implies that the male experience is universal, while the female experience is something only other women would be interested in. Even Joyce Carol Oates’ last book got the disembodied female head cover treatment! I understand where the term comes from – [books about] female protagonists looking for love in the big city – but my book has nothing to do with finding a man. Companies know that women are really the only ones who still buy books, which is good, but there has to be a better way to market them.
A few things. First of all, chick lit books aren't necessarily books about "finding a man". Marian Keyes is surely the Queen of chick lit and her books aren't about finding a man.
I can't find the Joyce Carol Oates book to which Brown refers - none of the covers look even remotely chick lit to me - but anyway the chick lit cover trend isn't a "disembodied female head", it's the opposite: a beheaded female body. (I'm not sure which of those sounds more unpleasant.)
As for the last sentence and "there has to be a better way to market them", well I wish there was too, but if there was a better way, the publishers would be doing it. Publishing is a business after all.
But the thing that bugged me most about this - and this may well just be me reading it from behind the chip on my shoulder (which is murder on the neck) was the tone seemed to be that, rather than being "just" a chick lit author as people may have though, Janelle Brown is, in fact, a serious, literary writer. But nothing she says about chick lit is anything new; in fact, we printed something very similar written by Megan Crane on this blog not long ago.
I suppose I just get annoyed at the idea that chick lit writers are dumbed down, antifeminist, and unaware of the inherent problems with the term "chick lit", while "serious" writers gain credibility by criticising it.
Or, like I said, it might just be me.
Oh and I just want to add that I'm not having a go at Janelle Brown, who seems very nice, just this whole "chick lit" versus "serious fiction" thing that really gets my goat.
