"Chick lit" is a term used to describe a type of popular fiction targeted at women. Widely used in the 1990s and 2000s, Though she didn't use the term chick lit, in a review of Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale, the critic noted that McMillan's book was not "lofty" or "luminous" but was likely to be highly commercially successful. Carolyn See wrote, "McMillan's new work is part of another genre entirely, so new it doesn't really have a name yet. This genre has to do with women, triumph, revenge, comradeship." and, in the UK, Oxford Reference report that the term arose as a "flippant counterpart" to the term "lad lit". chick lit jr (for young readers), In India the term "Ladki Lit" has been used (see below). In Turkey, literature is a category (çıtır literally means 'crispy', but is colloquialy used to refer to attractive young women)

Writers and critics

Controversy over chick lit focused at first on the literary value of books identified or promoted as part of the genre. Over time, controversy has focused more on the term itself, and whether the concept of a chick lit genre is inherently sexist.

In 1998, reviewer Alex Kuczynski, writing for The New York Times, condemned Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary, writing: "Bridget is such a sorry spectacle, wallowing in her man-crazed helplessness, that her foolishness cannot be excused." In 2001, writer Doris Lessing deemed the genre "instantly forgettable" while Beryl Bainbridge called chick lit "a froth sort of thing". Author Jenny Colgan immediately fired back at Lessing and Bainbridge, explaining why, for a new generation of women, chick lit was an important development:

Publishers

In 2000, Sydney Morning Herald described the "publishing phenomenon" of what it called "chicfic," books with "Covers [that] are candy-bright, heavy in pink and fluorescence. The titles are also candy-bright, hinting at easy digestion and a good laugh... ...Such books are positioned in a marketplace as hybrids of the magazine article, fictional or fictionalised, television...and comfort food digestible over a single night at home."

"Girls of Riyadh" has been published in English and is still in print in 2023; Publishers Weekly summarises the book as describing, "Four upper-class Saudi Arabian women [who] negotiate the clash between tradition and the encroaching West in this debut novel by 25-year-old Saudi Alsanea. Though timid by American chick lit standards, it was banned in Saudi Arabia for its scandalous portrayal of secular life." The book is widely distributed, being sold in stores from U.S. to Europe. In the reader's guide to novel, Alsanea notes that she wants to enable her Western readers to connect with Saudi culture, seeing that the girls in the novel had the 'same dreams, emotions, and goals' as them.

India

In India, Rajashree's Trust Me was the biggest-selling Indian chick lit novel. Swati Kaushal's Piece of Cake can be seen in the context of the rise of regional varieties of chick lit. In an interview with the New York Times, Helen Fielding said, "I think it had far more to do with zeitgeist than imitation." If the chick lit explosion has "led to great new female writers emerging from Eastern Europe and India, then it's worth any number of feeble bandwagon jumpers."

Brazil

In Brazil, chick lit in translation is categorised as "Literatura de mulherzinha." is the Portuguese diminutive form, so this means, literally, "little-women's literature." One Brazilian commentator notes, "The diminutive is not by accident. Just as its not by accident that the covers of books by women writers are usually, stereotypically feminine. With covers that suggest a light and romantic, commercial plot. ... books by female authors arrive to the a reader with a series of biases which ensure that these authors remain on the cultural bottom rung."

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Further reading

  • Roy, Pinaki. "The Chick Factor: A Brief Survey of the Indian Chick-lit Novels", The Postcolonial Woman Question: Readings in Indian Women Novelists in English. Eds. Ray, G.N. and J. Sarkar. Kolkata: Books Way, 2011 (). pp.&nbsp;213–23.
  • Rudin, Shai (2022). From Bridget Jones’s Diary to The Song of the Siren: The Genre of Chick Lit – Between East and West. Comparative Literature: East & West, Vol. 7, 1-21. DOI:10.1080/25723618.2022.2043615
  • "Collection Development 'Chick Lit': Hip Lit for Hip Chicks" Library Journal Article on the genre
  • "India's Cheeky 'Chick Lit' Finds an Audience"