Lauren Baratz-Logsted

This Is Chick Lit

In April 2005, an item appeared in Publishers Lunch, the online trade subscription newsletter, announcing a forthcoming collection called This is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers, edited by Elizabeth Merrick. Chick-Lit has been taking it on the chin, pretty much since the first pink-covered books started appearing in the ‘90s, but this felt like the last straw. Here was a book, defining itself by what it was not, an implicit shot at those who write the sort of books that this book is not. (I know. It’s a convoluted sentence, but then, it’s a pretty convoluted situation.)

After the initial wave of anger died down, an anger that was felt not only by me but also by pretty much well every Chick-Lit writer I know, we decided to take positive action. Glenn Yeffeth, publisher of BenBella Books, accepted my proposal to put together a response collection.

Getting contributors was easy. There were those I approached myself and then there were the volunteers, lots of volunteers. Before I knew it, there were 18 of us, including myself. The others are: Deanna Carlyle, Jennifer Coburn, Johanna Edwards, Karin Gillespie, Raelynn Hillhouse, Andrea Schicke Hirsch, Julie Kenner, Harley Jane Kozak, Stephanie Lehmann, Caren Lissner, Cara Lockwood, Ariella Papa, Kayla Perrin, Rachel Pine, Gena Showalter, Karen Siplin, and Heather Swain. Raelynn Hillhouse is our special guest star. She normally writes thrillers, but she saw our cause was just and contributed a wonderful story.

Once the contributors were in place, I set the task: I wanted chick-friendly stories invested with theme so that we could meet our goal of providing a positive showcase for the diversity of plots, depth and, yes, sheer fun Chick-Lit has to offer. I also asked the authors to contribute a recommendation for “Reaching Across the Aisle,” the appendix at the end of the book where each Chick writer taps one Lit that they feel their own fans would love. It is our small attempt to show that women writers can achieve more by pooling forces rather than investing in divisiveness.

The question naturally arises: Why bother? Why, when it takes so long to put an anthology together and anthologies notoriously pay poorly, bother at all? Why, come to that, be bothered by other people taking shots at Chick-Lit?

The answer is simple: Because it gets old. It gets old hearing people complain about all the pink books out there as if, were those books to suddenly poof out of existence tomorrow, every reading person would suddenly be rushing out to buy Thomas Pynchon. It gets old hearing the books get denigrated and miscast as being about no more than Manolos & Cosmos when in fact, while some of the books are just that, so many of the books are so much more. It gets old, reading reviews where the reviewer feels compelled to say, “This book is very good…for Chick-:it.” Chick-Lit is, at the end of the day, the one genre that doesn’t threaten people’s sense of political correctness to bash wholesale, whether they’ve read any of the books or not.

OK, that’s the negative.

Now here’s the positive.

We bothered because we’re proud of what we do. Many of us collected here write in other genres or cross-genres but we also value our achievements in this genre. We know that our books, even when those books are ostensibly light and humorous, often deal with weighty matters. Sure, I’ve yet to read a Chick-Lit novel that cures AIDS or solves the problems of Darfur, but then, what literary novel does? If you ever find one, please tell me, because I would love to read that book.

Chick-Lit authors put on their pants, one leg at a time, just like literary novelists. They work hard at their writing, just like literary novelists do. And they feel the sting of the reviewer’s pen when it strikes, just like literary novelists. The only difference is, when that pen strikes a Chick-Lit author, it tends to wipe out the whole genre at the same time. Tell me, what literary novelist would want to hear that their book is lousy and, oh, by the way, the entire field they’ve toiled in is worthless too?

Here’s what I hope: that people will read our book and that they will find work that provokes laughter and thought there. Here’s what I also hope, surprisingly enough: that the book that started all this, This is Not Chick Lit is a good one too because, I don’t know about you, but I love a good book.

The first novel I published, The Thin Pink Line, is classified as Chick-Lit. It’s also dedicated to my six-year-old daughter because being pregnant with her gave me the idea for the first of my novels that finally sold. I know she’s proud of my work now. I know this because she goes to the B’s in any bookstore and lets me know which of my books they have and which they’re out of. I know it because she tells her friends at school what I do. I know it because she asks for copies of my cover flats to pin on the wall beside her bed.

So here’s my final hope: that when my daughter grows up, she’s still proud of my accomplishments, despite all the sound and fury around Chick-Lit, or, better yet, because the sound and fury has passed, and the only criteria for a book is not what genre it falls into but whether the book is good or not, well-written or not.

Lauren Baratz-Logsted, in addition to being the editor of This Is Chick-Lit, had written four Chick-Lit novels: The Thin Pink Line, Crossing the Line, A Little Change of Face, and How Nancy Drew Saved My Life. She is also the author of the forthcoming literary suspense novel Vertigo and the serious Young Adult novel Angel’s Choice. You can read more about her work at www.laurenbaratzlogsted.com.