For a genre whose name recalls something as harmless as candy-coated gum, the term “chick-lit” sure has become divisive.
While the term was coined by writer and University of Illinois at Chicago professor Cris Mazza in a series of mid-1990s anthologies of alternative women’s fiction, it’s now commonly used to describe solidly commercial novels in the “Bridget Jones’s Diary” vein.
According to ChickLitBooks.com, the genre “is written mainly by women for women,” and differs from traditional women-centric fiction because its stories are “told in a more confiding, personal tone, like having your best friend tell you about your life.”
Of course, female authors wrote about women before “Bridget,” Helen Fielding’s lovingly neurotic British heroine, made her 1999 debut. But that novel and its subsequent movie versions “really kicked this market into high gear,” says author and book promoter Penny Sansevieri.
To fans, chick-lit is a positive term that can encompass authors and subjects both light and more serious. “As a Baby Boomer author, I think `chick-lit’ is not only legit … it is empowering and validating,” says Deborah Uetz.
But some see it as a dismissal of female authors, a way to categorize every book written by women in one cutesy catch phrase.
“I hate the term `chick-lit!'” says author Becky Due “`Women’s Literature’ or `Fiction’ works just fine,” says Due, who characterizes her work, like “The Gentlemen’s Club: A Story For All Women,” as “novels about strong women.
“Would men stand for `Dude Lit?'” she asks.
Mazza, who coined the phrase to describe a completely different sort of women’s story, responded to the current craze earlier this year in an essay, “Chick Lit and the Perversion of a Genre,” in Poets and Writers magazine.
According to Stephanie Harzewski, of the English Department at the University of Pennsylvania, “Mazza basically argues how chick lit went from something exciting and literary to something commercial, with one-dimensional writing and characters.”
Harzewski says that while she’s concerned that younger female writers might feel pushed into writing “chick-lit” because its success may make it seem the only way to break into a writing career, the genre has helped change “the way single women are represented. Historically, the never-married woman in literature has to be the object of scorn, pity or derision. … While chick lit may contain or undermine its representations of stylish achieving, professional women by having many novels end in marriage, it offers funny, capable single women who are not looking to settle.”
