The Death of Chick Lit

In the hot and heady days of summer 2005, when publishers’ hopes were still riding high, I sold my first novel, Bed Rest [2], to HarperCollins in the United States. It was women’s commercial fiction, or chick lit—a story of a successful New York lawyer whose life is thrown into chaos when she’s forced for months onto pregnancy bed rest. HarperCollins cheerfully threw a second book into the deal, a sequel called Sleepless Nights [3], as did my British publisher. The U.K. edition of the second novel came out last year, and the U.S. edition is due to appear this month. Yet as I started preparing the manuscript of Sleepless Nights for its American birth this summer, I realized that the chick-lit novel as we know it—one of the great publishing phenomena of recent times—is the product of a boom-time that has passed.

The big chick-lit novels of the last few decades are all, no doubt about it, deeply pre-recession in cast. Plum Sykes’s gloriously glamorous heroines sashay through the pages of her novels taking care to note the size of the jewels their friends wear to bed, not to mention the couture origin of every last item of clothing. Sophie Kinsella’s consumerist heroines are equally fascinated by apparel—but Becky, protagonist of The Confessions of a Shopaholic [4], hasn’t got the trust fund to back up her addiction to Denny and George scarves. To read about Kinsella’s 2000 London with the benefit of hindsight is to see a credit crash waiting to happen. Becky exists in a double reality—in the space of five minutes she switches from deciding she’s got to STOP SPENDING, to believing that winning the lottery is a really good way out of debt. And her credit card companies are just as confused. On the same day that the customer accounts section of her credit card company duns her for escalating debt, the customer services division sends a letter wildly encouraging her to spend more, dangling Italian handbags as an incentive.

Becky is charming and naughty and clearly appeals to the lurking spendthrift in all of us. But if she were writing the novel today, I doubt Kinsella would give her the same job—the character is, with wonderful irony, a financial journalist. Becky’s self-centeredness causes her to make serious mistakes that hurt others, not just herself. Think about Jon Stewart’s merciless savaging of Jim “Mad Money” Cramer on The Daily Show [5] for promoting risky investments. Are readers still willing to forgive a heroine who fecklessly encourages her middle-aged neighbors to make a make a financial decision that costs them £20,000?

I asked myself a parallel question as I began to revise my own chick-lit sequel for its American debut. I’d filled the backdrop of my story with the usual cheerful glamour—lawyers swapping stories about their wealthy summer vacations, nice clothes, easy living, scandalous gossip. Like most other women’s commercial fiction, mine was a mix of realism (the surprises of the first year of mothering) and escapism (a second heroine is courted by a superstar litigator). Rereading my novel in its pretty purple-and-blue 2008 U.K. cover, I knew I had to save it from its casual pre-recession excess. Cheery consumerism and aimless career-dithering were clearly out of touch in a world of mortgage defaulting, pink slips, and repossessed homes. And why should readers empathize with a couple of heroines who fritter their days away thinking about—well, not very much?

Hastily, I began to rewrite. There’s a limit to what you can do with an editor breathing down your neck, but in a single mad month I slashed and burned and frantically rebuilt.

For example, in the first scene of my novel, my heroine Quinn (or Q) goes to a party held by a partner at her big New York City Law Firm. Originally this scene was about rich young things flaunting their easy lives—“Caroline described her weekend helicoptering around the Azores ... Michael flaunted the giant yacht he was chartering around Hawaii for two thousand dollars a day. And Q, now at home with her new baby, felt horribly left out. But party chatter has changed now; I had to capture anxiety and edginess instead of dizzying wealth. So now Q moves through a crowd of high achievers who are nervously joking about their pallid 401(k)s while jostling to show they saw the crash coming. (“So I shifted seventy percent of my holdings to cash.”) I tried to show how inadequate and frightened Q’s former colleagues felt as they talked about lay-offs and restructuring. They hint that the firm itself may be unstable. Nothing is safe any more.

This new reality was bracing, but it led me into all sorts of plot problems. In the U.K. version of my book, Q and her husband Tom swan out of New York after the chatty party for a few weeks’ paid vacation in Connecticut—a vacation that gave them a crucial opportunity to rethink their lives. But firms these days are hardly likely to keep offices warm for associates who take all their vacation, who make choices that suggest work is not their number one priority. So how could I give my characters the opportunity for life-changing reflection and decisions? Surely in a rattled economy they’d just hunker down?

But the curious thing about Americans in a recession (and I say this as a bewildered transplanted Brit) is that you, well, don’t just hunker down. I listen to a lot of NPR, and the mood I kept hearing on the phone-in shows was, to my mind, astonishingly entrepreneurial. If “safe” is the new “unsafe, ” callers suggested, why not try something crazy and new? “Recession 101: Bill Gates founded Microsoft in a Recession,” reads a billboard I passed the other day. It was this attitude that gave me the key to resolving my narrative dilemma.

So in the American version of my new book, in a crucial passage Q’s husband Tom asks: “What do you want to do? If you could do anything in the world, I mean? If we weren’t in a recession? Save gorillas? Teach high school? What?” Q thinks hard. And in the end, rather than holding onto lives they don’t really want, lives of safe money but work-work-work, she and her husband decide to take a chance on a completely new life, to hell with the downturn. And ta-da, this allowed me to maintain the novel’s original trajectory.

Whereas before, if I’m going to be completely honest, my characters’ motivations to change were somewhat murky and self-centered, now they have a splash of excitement and energy about them. Somehow, the changes I’d made to try to keep up with the changing economy had actually made the novel better.

At first, I couldn’t think why. And then the academic in me kicked in, and it began to make sense. Financial uncertainty has been a key stimulus for plot since the novel as we know it took shape. The crises of the Victorian “Hungry Forties” in the 19th century produced a spate of particularly fine fiction—the so-called “condition of England” novels by writers like Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell. In George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss [6], the financial ruin of Maggie Tulliver’s father is the novel’s defining event, allowing Eliot to dissect human responses to hardship in meticulous detail.

In our own boom years, more than a century later, chick-lit turned inward, to relational and emotional crises. Because the external circumstances were steadily sunny, writers looked mostly inside their characters for the energy to drive and motivate plot. But now, those of us who write women’s fiction for mass consumption must inevitably look outward again. We are not about to turn into Gaskell and Eliot. But like the great architects of the novel, we can write stories about heroines who must take on the world, not just themselves.

At the end of Sleepless Nights, Quinn heads to her old office to clear out her desk and discovers the unthinkable: Her firm is about to go under. “I walked out of the building into the fresh, cold air, feeling as if the whole world had changed,” she recounts. I’m guessing chick-lit authors around the country are penning similar lines. In the next months and years, expect to see plots that turn on overcoming repossession and job-loss, not shopping and sex. The frothiest novels must respond to a more sober age. Like many American businesses, chick-lit must reinvent itself—fast—if it’s going to survive.