We won’t be too snarky about CNN’s chicklit story — after all, it does explore what we think is the coming of age of the genre. You know, where publishers realize there’s more to female lives than shopping and gossiping with a gender-balanced (three straight female, one gay male) group of friends. Not that we object to shopping, especially for shoes. Clothes, we can give or take — we have a hate-hate relationship with dressing room mirrors.
So we are going to respectfully disagree with Margaret Marbury of Red Dress Ink:
“Readers want a female-looking book on the outside. They want to know what they’re getting,” Marbury said. She also noted that editorial and marketing are often at odds over cover design. “But the books that have a good story to tell are the ones that are going to survive.”
While we cheerfully and frequently judge books by their covers, we are of a certain age and don’t require a, uh, “female-looking” cover. Good story, interesting cover copy, yes, but we don’t need gender identification. We’re not even sure what that means.
Ah, look, we’ve gone and digressed again. What we wanted to say was, “Finally.” Women’s fiction over the past, well, as long as we’ve been female has been straight romance and intensely emotional stories of overcoming heartbreaking tragedy. Which is fine, but we like to explore some of the lighter sides of the human experience. We hoped chicklit would fill that void — or at the very least offer something more akin to our views when those intensely emotional heartbreaking tragedies arose. It took a little longer than we expected (we believe every female editor who has dreamed of writing books has now done so), but it appears chicklit is moving into adolescence.
Which to us means less shopping and more insight. That can only be good.
