Chick Lit: What is it?

I know use of the term "chick lit" can cause people to have instant hernias or it can make them feel like they want to scream or have a cocktail. But I am thinking about this term today because I recently read I Think I Love You by Alison Pearson and then yesterday I saw "Something Borrowed" which is based on a book by Emily Giffin.
Both of these books take on relationships between women as their central themes, although they both follow the traditional Romantic Comedy formula: girls  love boys, or the same boy, and this affects or might affect their friendship, obstacles are overcome, the girls each end up with the boy they should end up with, sometimes causing the disastrous ruin of their friendship. One of the important sub-themes of Romantic Comedies, however, is the hurtful way some women treat other women.
The formula of Romantic Comedy necessitates a reliance on stereotype: women love to shop! blonde women are fun and bitchy, not troubled by intellectualism! brunettes are brainy and compassionate! the best male friend is also intellectual and cute in a geeky way and he's  in love with the nice girl! But she doesn't love him! I could go on...but I know you all understand.
Now after watching the movie "Something Borrowed" which was definitely the standard formulaic Romantic Comedy, and having read I Think I Love You over the weekend,  I start to wonder whether Romantic Comedy and Chick Lit are the same categories, basically, and whether Chick Lit can ever be more than the formulaic women centered fiction we think of, or would it be possible for a woman to write a book that is considered Chick Lit that fundamentally changes the definition of Chick Lit, or if a book defies that narrow formula it's just not considered Chick Lit.
I know this is not a new discussion, but I was bothered by a few things in "Something Borrowed." One is the notion that getting married means choosing between your female best friend and your male soul mate. It seems, in this configuration, you can't have it both ways. Obviously this is not realistic, but I wonder why so many Chick Lit novels set this up as a fundamental conflict.
The second question is why, when a novel has an important relationship at its core, is this novel automatically deemed less important or weighty than a novel that takes on some other kind of issue?
No, these questions might never be answered, but I guess this is what is on my mind.

I don't want you think I'm not Reading....

Because I am. Maybe too much, because I'm not finishing anything. Well, here's what I'm reading right now.








































And of course, still, Bleak House. Oh, The Dickens.

Quiet Americans by Erica Dreifus

What I love about short story collections is also what can put me off: the coherence of the stories. So it is refreshing when the stories in a collection hang together in a way that each story complements or adds to the others, and yet still brings something fresh to the mix. Some people might call this unevenness in a collection, but I think unevenness occurs when some stories aren’t up to the craft or storytelling of the others. I actually don’t like story collections where the stories are overly-thematically linked, or where I feel the stories hit the same note again and again.

The Quiet Americans includes stories in different styles, with various narrative approaches and most of the stories reach a consistently high level of craft and storytelling. The first story in the collection “For Services Rendered,” set a tone that would not have been welcome if it had been maintained for the entire book.  Luckily, the second story, “Matrilineal Descent,” employed a different structure and voice. The jump between the two modeled the leaps that occur throughout the book. While the book overall presents some coherent themes relating to the Holocaust, family, survival, and secrecy, different stories deal pick up various strands, some themes disappear only to be picked up a few stories later. The different stories and themes accumulate to evoke emotions and ideas that resonate together without becoming overbearing.

“For Services Rendered,” which starts the book, begins with a Jewish doctor in Berlin, then follows the doctor and his family to the United States. I understand why this story starts the book. The book begins in Germany and moves to the United States, just as the stories demonstrate the shift from the effects on one generation to how those effects filter down through generations. But I really loved the next story, “Matrilineal Descent,” and one reason might be because the voice shifts so radically, from a more distant, observing third-person to a third-person that is really a first-person with very specific views about the story. The voice of this story fantastically weaves  opinionated asides into a story that is told almost like a fairy tale. I was glad that later stories dealt with characters who were part of this family, and I found myself wishing that there would be even more stories, continuing the lives of these characters. Perhaps there is a novel in there, waiting to be finished.

Overall, this collection won me over slowly, story by story. I was a bit worried that the stories might focus too exclusively on the generation who survived World War II and the Holocaust, but what I ultimately enjoyed about these stories was the ways in which they traced the influence of that generation on each successive generation, not just through genealogy, but through omission and exclusion as well. The stories connect to one another in meaningful and sometimes surprising ways, illuminating the silences and secrets in our dark pasts. 

Short Story Collections by Women

In 2011, I want to read more books by women actually published in 2011. I'm forever trying to catch up and, like many things in my life, it just ain't going to happen. So, instead of trying to catch up (which I'm still going to try to do anyway, knowing I will fail), I'm going to try to read a lot of books published in 2011.
Dear readers, will you help me? Please recommend books that were published in 2010 or are about to be published in 2011. By women. I am going to begin by focusing on short story collections, but I will expand that.
I love to read, and I have strong opinions, so I decided I'm going to post reviews here regularly, along with continued commentary about my life in general.
Watch this space for a Lionel Shriver recap, coming soon.

Post-Reading Break-it-Down

First, I love our valiant MC. He was so over the top nice in his introduction. You know what I'm talking about.
Second, I DID read the F-word/sex story and everyone seemed to love it. I'm not sure all the elderly folks in the room loved it, but everyone else seemed to. My former student and her friend liked it. Some random audience members I didn't know liked it. My smart fiction friends got the whole "unreliable narrator" thing. Thank you, friends.
Third, the person I read with was nice and lovely and new to me, so that's always cool, to meet a new writer person.
Fourth, a friend and I had an interesting conversation about the first-person, which is always interesting (to me anyway), talking about narrators, etc.
Fifth, I gots paid! There is money to be made in fiction, friends, don't let anybody tell you different.
Now, I must go collapse into my bed.

New Story

As I was writing on the novel, which often feels like slogging through mud, I received inspiration for a new story, which I began working on.
So, I wrote very little today on The Novel, but I wrote 10 pages (4,150 words) on the new story, "Domestic Drama."
I will post a bit, the inspiration for the story, here. I feel like the inspiration was just in time, as I was beginning to feel, because of the slogging, that I am not much of a writer. But the new story was fun. Which leads me to question why the novel isn't. But I've always loved brevity, so there's that. And doing something new always has its appeal too, doesn't it?
I hope to get back to the novel later tonight, or tomorrow. And to finish this story for my writing group at the end of the month.
So here's the first paragraph, which came to me in a burst of inspiration. Thank you, to wherever it came from.

He found me in the bedroom. I had the butcher knife and I was holding it in my right hand and with my left I was looking through a pile of clean laundry I had left on the bed. I was looking for a red handkerchief which I had given him for his last birthday and which would make a good tool for wiping up blood, but that was not why I was looking for it. I was looking for it because it had just sprung to my mind as I was deboning the chops for dinner. I hadn’t seen it in months and I thought that maybe it was missing or, I thought, maybe it was in the pile of clean clothes on the bed. That was the only place it could be.

The Benefit of Low Expectations

My favorite thing about seeing movies at the Dollar Theater (which actually costs $1.50, but nevermind about that, that doesn't have the same ring as Dollar Theater, who would call it the Dollar-Fifty Theater?) is that my expectations are so low, I am often pleasantly surprised when the movie is better than average, good even.
Take tonight's selection, "Stranger Than Fiction." Going in, I knew it starred Will Ferrell (whom I love, and will always love if for no other reason than the Cheerleader Skit on SNL), Emma Thompson (who doesn't love Emma Thompson? If you don't, I don't want to know. She said something once in an interview about having a "big-shouldered" admiration for something or someone, I forget, but I still think she was talking about me), Maggie Gyllenhal (besides having the world's most attractive brother AND husband (is that fair?), she's an amazing actress), Dustin Hoffman (as a college professor! who is also a lifeguard! and reads Sue Grafton while he's lifeguarding!), and wait, I haven't even gotten to the best part, Queen Latifah!!! (as the writer's assistant. Is that fair? I'm sure I could write a great novel if I had Queen Latifah to bring me coffee and arrange notecards in my sparsley furnished apartment).
My expectations for this film were low. How low? Well, I had heard almost nothing about it (buzz=0), and it seemed like it had hit the dollar theater pretty quickly, so I was prepared for it to be funny in parts, charming in parts, and to have some flaw, major or minor, that would make me like it a little less.
Well, of course I was pleasantly surprised. The only flaw, that I could see, were the several scenes where the mic was lowered too far. But being the great post-modernist that I am, I wondered, briefly, if I was supposed to see the mic. Like the director reminding me, "hello! you're watching a movie!" Unfortunately, I think it was just a mistake. But, as I said, that was the only flaw.
The great strengths of this film, aside from the amazing cast, were the intelligent script, the clever but not too clever camera work, and soundtrack.
Plus, Dustin Hoffman, as charming, caffeine-swilling, self-involved college professor, gets to say, quoting from a line that is the Will Ferrell character's life, "Little did he know? Little did he know? I wrote a paper on 'Little did he know.' I taught a whole seminar on 'Little did he know.'" Perhaps the reason this film did not do better is because only graduate students and college teachers will think that is funny.
But count me pleasantly surprised. I highly recommend this film. And, actually, the dollar theater is still the dollar theater before five.
So that's the benefit of low expectations.
(Unfortunately, my expectations were not so low for the Ginger dairy-free, gluten-free, egg-free cookie I took as my "snack." Let's just say I was not pleasantly surprised. But I did eat the whole thing.)