Chick Lit turns ten; film at eleven

Aside from scratching my head because I’m pretty damn sure I read this piece before, Carol Memmott‘s piece in USA TODAY about the state of chick lit 10 years after BRIDGET JONES’ DIARY doesn’t exactly tread a lot of new ground. But at least it gets some decent quotes about where the subgenre’s at, and why, despite the dire warnings, it’s still not dead.

“Chick lit is proving to be surprisingly adaptable,” says Mallory Young, who with Suzanne Ferriss edited Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. “Instead of continuing to get that very same Bridget Jones clone again and again, we’re getting some different versions.”

But the genre, Memmott writes, is also is riddled with one-hit wonders and books that some say should never have been published. Blame that in part on overeager publishers. “Publishers nailed it in a way no one had ever done before,” says Liate Stehlik of Avon Books. “Like anything, when something is successful, it explodes, and there are a million things like it. Some are really good, and some are subpar.” Stehlik compares the genre’s history to the glut of reality TV shows the past several years.

But what about a fairly recent trend, where chick lit has gone into motherhood territory? “A lot of the offshoots of chick lit didn’t work particularly well,” says B&N Fiction buyer Sesalee Hensley, referring to specialized subgenres such as bridezilla lit. “But now every third woman I see is pregnant and under 25, and all the younger Hollywood people are having children.”

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