Grace Reading Series

I seriously have forgotten how to blog. I keep writing these treatises. If I were more organized I would write an article about this and be done with it.

So the chick lit discussion is brewing and bubbling up again this week, with that dear old media perception of a catfight should one woman disagree with another, as well as (I think this part is hilarious but people do seem to take the argument seriously) accusations that any criticism of chick lit is anti-feminist.

Anyway! Rebecca Traister's got a long piece in Salon today, largely delineating the history of fluffy romance novels not being taken seriously. Towards the end I think she gets to something essential:

Margaret Atwood has herself claimed to have written the first chick-lit novel, 1969's "The Edible Woman." When pressed by an interviewer about how hers is better than what's out there now, Atwood responded, "Well, some chick-lit books are better than others. I thought Bridget Jones was quite a howl. There's good, bad and mediocre in everything ... So ... if it's about young women we're not supposed to take it seriously?" . . .

This fear [of not being taken seriously] is valid, especially in a cultural atmosphere in which "women's magazine" is a derogatory term but Esquire routinely wins National Magazine Awards, in which Weisberger and Bushnell merit a combined review but a first novel by a man about a single guy in his 20s looking for love and professional fulfillment gets lauded in a full-cover review on the front of the New York Times Book Review.

It's not about the chick lit--it's about having more space for serious women writers. I want to see wondergirls as well as wonderboys. (Although I do think it is major progress that we have a wonderboy who has gotten there through attentive, thoughtful writing rather than on riveting, heroic personality or slight gimmick).

It's not enough to knock on the door of an agency or a publishing house or the New Yorker or wherever to try to request that our hordes of serious women writers be taken more seriously: I'm ready to find the authors and get the books out there to the audience that doesn't need a big ol' blog explanation of why chick lit is mostly very boring to read. There IS that audience, and they are being left behind. Fine. I will do something about that. It is going to take me awhile and sometimes the electric bill is not going to get paid but it is easier and more efficient to create that community of readers this way than by asking huge corporations politely, crankily, whatever, to do it for us.

It's exciting: fuck "the fear is valid." It's not a fear: it's an unfair, predictable, often pedestrian reality that women aren't taken seriously. More importantly this reality provides an ample space to create something new and fabulous.

Anyway, I have some distribution issues and some website stuff and this and that to try to get together today so I am bowing out of the debate for the day at least. I do not know how to blog and run a business at the same time but you will see me do it--especially next week! Big excitement to come.

More from our gorgeous punk rocker Lisa Selin Davis on her last night of the First Fiction Tour soon.

xxo