Mommy Lit, the Sunday Styles Way

Lizzie Skurnick gets the scoop on a trend that maybe isn’t a trend at all, or just an offshoot of an older one, or maybe a marketing invention by publishing. Mommy Lit, in other words, faces the same problems that its younger, more single cousin does: stigma, ghettoizing and snobbery. “A lot of it reads like someone sat around in a marketing meeting and said, ‘What can we sell to this generation of mothers?” said Heather Armstrong of Dooce.com fame and a so-called “mommy blogger” – one of many who detracts books purportedly written about them.

If authors of mom lit are united in anything, Skurnick says, it’s a universal dislike for the term. Some authors say it is sexist, preventing writers from being taken seriously by lumping them together. “My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing ‘The Aeneid’ and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit,” said Jennifer Weiner. “Crone lit – is that what’s coming next?” Well, it sounds about as good as AARP lit, I suppose…

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