By Anonymous, an ex-fiction editor, via Jessa: Chick Lit Hurts America:
The only issue here is the one that the chick literati never address but instead try to obfuscate with the red herrings of feminism and elitism, which is that their writing is hackneyed and boring and bad. Point out to a chick-lit author that her writing is inferior and formulaic, and she will call you a vengeful, misogynistic stone-thrower.
But while the work may not hold up under scrutiny, the sales do. Beyond adding to the cultural cesspool, what’s dangerous about chick lit is that it fills trade slots at publishing companies that used to be given to literary fiction. Unlike romance or sci-fi, chick lit is a genre that is in direct competition with literature because of its price point and packaging. Romance novels look like romance novels. I know not to buy a book with a longhaired, bare-chested hunk monkey on the cover if I don’t want to read one. But chick lit premiered in hardcover and then moved to trade paperback. And though they’re all about boys, there are seldom any boys on the cover. Brilliant! The genre succeeded exactly because it looked more literary than its embarrassing romance counterpart. You could take Bridget Jones’s Diary on the T and not look like a dateless loser. And while this meant huge sales, it also meant that forever after, serious women’s literature was either overlooked for chick lit, or worse, made to look like chick lit.
The truth is that chick lit is bad for America because it’s bad for ambitious, literary writers, male or female. And that means it’s bad for all of us. As America increasingly devalues intellectual rigor, education and compassion, it becomes harder and harder to find a good book. And believe me—the ex-fiction editor—it’s not because they’re not out there. It’s because the market is saturated by bad writers claiming to rep for all women, crowding the bookshelves, making sure their one marginal, vapid story is produced ten million times over, like some pretty pink version of hell.
