I did a long interview with the Buffalo News. It breaks down a lot of the broader picture of what my best guess is at what's going on with women in the literary realm:
"It's an attempt to convey a sense of our lives that is beyond the women's fashion magazines. This is essential. This is crucial.
"If you try to fit your life into this narrative of "buy some nice clothes, find a good man and everything will be fine', there's pretty much one step after that - the self-help aisle. Or Prozac. It's not going to work. We need those stories that take a broader view."
And "stories" she says "are really what hold people's lives together."
The question of what is going on with women in the literary world is a big one: it's pretty much a semester-long women's studies course to get a real handle on it. I always say, this discussion of chick lit is the tip of just one iceberg. There are other icebergs involved, such as: Big Boy Books; review and byline percentages; what we think of as authoritative; Oprah's Book Club; and the economic transformation of the publishing industry in the past ten years.
The sharp and talented Buffalo News journalist Jeff Simon got me to scale a whole bunch of these icebergs--I think I maybe drank a lot of coffee before this interview so I sound extra-spastic but it covers a lot of ground.