Chick lit

"Chick lit" is a term used to describe a type of popular fiction targeted at women. Widely used in the 1990s and 2000s,<ref name="googlewordcount" /> the term has fallen out of fashion with publishers,<ref name=Salon /> with numerous writers and critics rejecting it as inherently sexist.<ref name=Heike /> Novels identified as chick lit typically address romantic relationships, female friendships, and workplace struggles in humorous and lighthearted ways.<ref name=Jessica /> Typical protagonists are urban, heterosexual women in their late twenties and early thirties:<ref name="libraryjournal1" /><ref name="Terry" /> the 1990s chick lit heroine represented an evolution of the traditional romantic heroine in her assertiveness, financial independence and enthusiasm for conspicuous consumption.<ref name=chen />

The format developed through the early 1990s on both sides of the Atlantic with books such as Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale (1992, US) and Catherine Alliott's The Old Girl Network (1994, UK). Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary (1996, UK), wildly popular globally, is the "Ur-text" of chick lit, while Candace Bushnell's (US) 1997 novel Sex and the City, adapted to a well-known television program, has huge ongoing cultural influence.<ref name="bridget" /><ref name=":0" />

By the late 1990s, chick lit titles regularly topped bestseller lists, and many imprints were created devoted entirely to it. By the mid-2000s, commentators noted that its market was increasingly saturated,<ref name="pandemic" /> and by the early 2010s, publishers had largely abandoned the category. Nonetheless, the term "chick lit" persists as a popular category of fiction for both readers and amateur writers on the internet.

While the concept of "chick lit" has become outdated in developed-world English language literature,Template:Citation needed the term, and regional derivations of it, continue to be widely used to describe and analyse popular women's literature in other languages and other parts of the world.

Origins and derivations of the term

File:Terry McMillan at the 2008 Brooklyn Book Festival.jpg

Author Terry McMillan, in 2008. McMillan's 1992 novel Waiting to Exhale predated the chick-lit label but, in its focus on the lives of a group of 30-something single women professionals, has been identified as a key precursor of the category

Template:See also Template:See also In 1992, Los Angeles Times critic Carolyn See was probably the first to spot that a new style of popular women's fiction was emerging.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Though she didn't use the term chick lit, in a review of Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale, the critic noted that McMillan's book was not "lofty" or "luminous" but was likely to be highly commercially successful. Carolyn See wrote, "McMillan's new work is part of another genre entirely, so new it doesn't really have a name yet. This genre has to do with women, triumph, revenge, comradeship."<ref name=See />

Chick lit did not become an established term for a style of novel until the second half of the 1990s. "Chick" is American slang for a young woman, and "lit" is a shortened form of the word "literature." There was probably no single origin of the term: Princeton University students were reported in 1988 to use chick lit as slang for a course on the Female Literary Tradition<ref name=Alma /><ref name=Showalter>Intriguingly, the course was created and taught by the prominent critic, Elaine Showalter who shortly afterwards strongly advocated for, and wrote about, lad lit as a critical term (see lad lit) Could Showalter actually have been the first to use "Chick lit?" {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> and, in the UK, Oxford Reference report that the term arose as a "flippant counterpart" to the term "lad lit".<ref name="OxfordLads" /> The parallel term used for movies, chick flick, enjoyed slightly earlier uptake.<ref name="googlewordcount" /> In what was probably one of its first major outings, the term chick lit was deployed ironically: Chick Lit: Postfeminist Fiction was a 1995 anthology of 22 short stories written in response to editors Cris Mazza's and Jeffrey DeShell's call for "postfeminist writing."<ref name="Mazza" /> Early use of the term was heavily associated with journalism (both Bridget Jones's Diary and Sex in the City began as newspaper columns) and James Wolcott's 1996 article in The New Yorker, "Hear Me Purr," co-opted the term chick lit to proscribe what he called the trend of "girlishness" evident in the writing of female newspaper columnists at that time.<ref name=purr />

In the early years, there was some variation on the exact term used: in 2000, the Sydney Morning Herald reported the birth of a "publishing phenomenon" that can be called "chick fiction."<ref name=SMH />

At the peak of the term's popularity, a slew of related sub-genres were proposed with similar names<ref name="routledge">Template:Cite book</ref> chick lit jr (for young readers),<ref name="routledge" /> mommy lit,<ref name="routledge" /> and chick lit in corsets (historical fiction, and a term only found in one academic paper published in the Journal of Popular Romance Studies).<ref name=jprstudies.org /> The relationship with the term lad lit is more complicated: lad lit arose in the UK separately from, and possibly before, chick lit.<ref name="OxfordLads" /> Later, the term lad lit was adopted in the US for a male-oriented subgenre of chick lit (see lad lit). Of these parallel terms, mommy lit, and lad lit are the only terms to have enjoyed any significant uptake - and that a tiny fraction of the use of the primary term chick lit.<ref name="googlewordcount" />

Other derivations of the term chick lit have been used to describe varieties of popular women's literature in different regions, or targeted at specific ethnic communities. In the US this has included "Sistah lit"<ref name=routledge /> targeted at black readers and "Chica lit" for Latina readers.<ref name=Castro>Template:Cite journal</ref> In India the term "Ladki Lit" has been used (see below). In Turkey, Template:Wikt-lang literature is a category (çıtır literally means 'crispy', but is colloquialy used to refer to attractive young women)<ref name=citir>Template:Cite journal</ref>

Writers and critics

Controversy over chick lit focused at first on the literary value of books identified or promoted as part of the genre. Over time, controversy has focused more on the term itself, and whether the concept of a chick lit genre is inherently sexist.Template:Cn

In 1998, reviewer Alex Kuczynski, writing for The New York Times, condemned Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, writing: "Bridget is such a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness, that her foolishness cannot be excused."<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> In 2001, writer Doris Lessing deemed the genre "instantly forgettable" while Beryl Bainbridge called chick lit "a froth sort of thing".<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Author Jenny Colgan immediately fired back at Lessing and Bainbridge, explaining why, for a new generation of women, chick lit was an important development:

We really are the first generation who have grown up with education as a right; with financial independence; with living on our own and having far too many choices about getting married (while watching our baby boomer parents fall apart), having children (while watching our elder sisters run themselves ragged trying to do everything), and hauling ourselves up through the glass ceiling.

Who reflects this? Growing up in the 1980s all we had to read if we wanted commercial fiction, were thick, shiny, brick novels covered in gold foil, in which women with long blonde hair built up business empires from harsh beginnings using only their extraordinary beauty and occasionally some goldfish...

With BJD, for the first time, here we were. The first time I read it, it was an absolute revelation to see my life and confusion reflected in print.{{#if:Jenny Colgan, 2001<ref name=Hula />|{{#if:yes|}}

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Two years later Colgan had turned strongly against the term chick lit, being the first to state what is now a mainstream position among writers of women's popular fiction: she rejected the term chick lit while defending the cultural value of her work. She observed, "Chick-lit is a deliberately condescending term they use to rubbish us all. If they called it slut-lit it couldn't be any more insulting."<ref name=rubbish>Template:Cite news</ref> Much of the debate at this time was between different generations of women writers: for example, Maureen Dowd (b.1952) described the younger women's work as "all chick and no lit,"<ref name= libraries /> while Colgan (b.1972) derided the older, female critics of chick lit as "hairy-leggers."<ref name=rubbish /> There was a "troubling" lack of solidarity.<ref name=libraries>Template:Cite journal</ref>

In 2005, debate continued with the publication of editor Elizabeth Merrick's anthology of women's fiction, This Is Not Chick Lit (2005), where Merrick argued in her introduction that "Chick lit's formula numbs our senses."<ref name=":1" /> In response, self-identifying chick-lit author Lauren Baratz-Logsted published her own anthology of stories This Is Chick Lit<ref name=":2">Template:Cite book</ref> whose project was "born out of anger" and aimed to prove that chick lit was not all "Manolos and cosmos, and cookie-cutter books about women juggling relationships and careers in the new millennium," but rather that the genre deals with "friendship and laughter, love and death - i.e. the stuff of life."<ref name=":2" />

In 2007, Diane Shipley<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> came to the genre's defence, arguing that chick lit books increasingly covered serious topics but, anyway, "I just don't see what's morally or intellectually wrong with reading a book you enjoy and relate to, that might not draw deep conclusions about the future of humanity but might cheer you up after a bad day, or see you through your own health problems."

However, in general through the late 2000s and 2010s writers of women's popular fiction increasingly distanced themselves from the term chick lit, while arguing that blanket critical dismissals of their work were rooted in sexism. For example, in a 2010 Guardian article, humor writer DJ Connell leads with changing her writing name from Diane to DJ to avoid the chick lit label.<ref name=DJ /> Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes, two authors who have enjoyed huge success through and beyond the chick lit era, both now reject the term. Kinsella refers to her own work as "romantic comedy".<ref name=Aitkenhead /> Keyes said of the term in 2014,

It's meant to be belittling. It's as if it's saying, "Oh you silly girls, with your pinkness and shoes, how will you ever run the world?" But as I've matured (haha) I've realised that I'm very proud of what I write about and I know that the books I write bring happiness and comfort to people.{{#if:Marian Keyes, 2014 <ref>Template:Cite news</ref>|{{#if:no|}}

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Publishers

In 2000, Sydney Morning Herald described the "publishing phenomenon" of what it called "chicfic," books with "Covers [that] are candy-bright, heavy in pink and fluorescence. The titles are also candy-bright, hinting at easy digestion and a good laugh... ...Such books are positioned in a marketplace as hybrids of the magazine article, fictional or fictionalised, television...and comfort food digestible over a single night at home."<ref name=SMH />

Through the 2000s publishers continued to push the subgenre because sales continued to be high. In 2003, Publishers Weekly reported on numerous new chick lit imprints, such as, "Kensington's Strapless, which launched in April 2003 and has one book a month scheduled through the end of 2004. Kensington editorial director John Scognamiglio explained that the imprint was created in response to requests from salespeople for a chick lit brand." Nonetheless, the same Publishers Weekly article was already looking back enviously at the massive sales achieved by Bridget Jones's Diary in 1998 and commenting on the challenges for chick lit publishers in a now-overcrowded market. Already, Publishers Weekly suggested, chick lit was - if not in decline - at least at a turning point.<ref name=PW />

In 2008, editor Sara Nelson stated that the definition of what's considered to be within the genre of chick lit has become more accomplished and "grown up".<ref name=twsOctJ55f />

By 2012 news sources were reporting the death of chick lit. Salon.com reported that "Because chick lit (whatever it is - or was) provoked so many ideologically fraught arguments about the values placed on women's vs. men's tastes, high- vs. lowbrow culture, comedy vs. drama and so on, it's tempting to read particular significance into its decline," but went on to argue that the decline was due to a normal process of changing fashion and taste in genre fiction.<ref name=Salon />

Chick lit online

The development and decline of chick lit as a publishing phenomenon coincided with an explosion in internet usage in the developed world.<ref name=internet /> The academic Sandra Folie argues that "Fans and their websites or blogs, online presences of newspapers, magazines, or publishing houses, and also the free encyclopedia Wikipedia" played a key part in defining and shaping the concept of a chick lit genre.<ref name=Folie /> Folie discusses the British site chicklit.co.uk which was online from 2002 to 2014 and included information not just on books and authors but also lifestyle issues for young women. The American Chicklitbooks.com was online from 2003 to 2013 discussing, "Hip, bright literature for today's modern woman."<ref name=Folie /> As chick lit declined as a publishing category fans online created their own response: in 2012 a website called chicklitisnotdead.com was reported to have 25,000 users.<ref name=diego /> In 2022 an active chick lit community group on the goodreads.com site had 4,756 members.<ref name=goodreads />

Chick lit globally

Though chick lit originated in the UK and U.S., it rapidly became a global publishing phenomenon - and indeed may have been one of the first truly global publishing trends.

Saudi Arabia

Template:See also In a book published in 2011, and in an article in Le Monde Diplomatique, academic Madawi Al-Rasheed discussed the emergence of Saudi "chick lit" over the preceding decade. Highlighting books from Saudi women authors including Raja Alsanea (Girls of Riyadh) and Samar al-Muqrin, Al-Rasheed characterises the books - which were first published in the more liberal Lebanon - as "novels that deal with women as active sexual agents.. ..rather than submissive victims of patriarchal society."<ref name=Madawi>Template:Cite news</ref>

"Girls of Riyadh" has been published in English and is still in print in 2023; Publishers Weekly summarises the book as describing, "Four upper-class Saudi Arabian women [who] negotiate the clash between tradition and the encroaching West in this debut novel by 25-year-old Saudi Alsanea. Though timid by American chick lit standards, it was banned in Saudi Arabia for its scandalous portrayal of secular life."<ref name=PW2>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> The book is widely distributed, being sold in stores from U.S. to Europe. In the reader's guide to novel, Alsanea notes that she wants to enable her Western readers to connect with Saudi culture, seeing that the girls in the novel had the 'same dreams, emotions, and goals' as them.<ref name=Readers>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref>

India

In India, Rajashree's Trust Me was the biggest-selling Indian chick lit novel.<ref name=Alley /> The popularity of novels like Trust Me,<ref>"Trust Me to spill beans on Bollywood", CNN-IBN, 18 February 2007.</ref> Swati Kaushal's Piece of Cake <ref>India's Cheeky "Chick Lit" Finds An Audience</ref> can be seen in the context of the rise of regional varieties of chick lit.<ref>Asha Menon "Indian chick lit?"</ref> In an interview with the New York Times, Helen Fielding said, "I think it had far more to do with zeitgeist than imitation." If the chick lit explosion has "led to great new female writers emerging from Eastern Europe and India, then it's worth any number of feeble bandwagon jumpers."<ref name="pandemic" /> Sunaina Kumar wrote in the Indian Express, "Ten years after the publication of Bridget Jones's Diary, the genre of fiction most recognisable for its pink cover art of stilettos, martini glasses and lipsticks, is now being colourfully infused with bindis, saris, and bangles." Indian chick lit is sometimes referred to as 'ladki-lit'.<ref>Sunaina Kumar "The Rise of Ladki-Lit", The Indian Express, 8 October 2006.</ref>

Brazil

In Brazil, chick lit in translation is categorised as "Literatura de mulherzinha." -inha is the Portuguese diminutive form, so this means, literally, "little-women's literature." One Brazilian commentator notes, "The diminutive is not by accident. Just as its not by accident that the covers of books by women writers are usually, stereotypically feminine. With covers that suggest a light and romantic, commercial plot.. ....books by female authors arrive to the a reader with a series of biases which ensure that these authors remain on the cultural bottom rung."<ref name=Martins />

See also

• Chick flick
• Feminism
• Fratire
• Lad lit
• Women's literature

Further reading

• Template:Cite journal
• Roy, Pinaki. "The Chick Factor: A Brief Survey of the Indian Chick-lit Novels", The Postcolonial Woman Question: Readings in Indian Women Novelists in English. Eds. Ray, G.N. and J. Sarkar. Kolkata: Books Way, 2011 (Template:ISBN). pp. 213–23.
• Rudin, Shai (2022). From Bridget Jones’s Diary to The Song of the Siren: The Genre of Chick Lit – Between East and West. Comparative Literature: East & West, Vol. 7, 1-21. DOI:10.1080/25723618.2022.2043615

External links

• "Collection Development 'Chick Lit': Hip Lit for Hip Chicks" Library Journal Article on the genre
• "India's Cheeky 'Chick Lit' Finds an Audience"