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, 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, 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, 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 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.