What You Miss When You Snub "Chick Lit"

[image description: a white, heterosexual couple looking at each other as they stand between two large rows of bookshelves. A third person is holding up a book with the word “happy” in big letters on the cover in the foreground.]

I’ve long believed that the way books are marketed by publishers, and therefore how they’re perceived in the marketplace of bookstores and readers, is at times unfair and incorrect. I’ve suspected some authors, whether rightly or wrongly, have been pigeonholed or made to look like a one-trick pony, which raises their profile for some crowds and lowers it for others.

I remember when The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer was set to release. I follow the publisher, Riverhead, on Instagram and they hyped the book incessantly. They’ve published a lot of National Book Award winners, so they weren’t shy about saying that they thought The Female Persuasion had award-winning potential. It was called a literary masterpiece.

Their hype was warranted––it was a good book. I read it when it first came out and thoroughly enjoyed it.

I didn’t think too much about the way the book was talked about at the time, until recently when I read Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner. Unlike Meg Wolitzer who’s marketed as a writer of “literary fiction,” Jennifer Weiner’s books are called “chick lit” and put in the “women’s fiction” section of the bookstore.

If I’m being honest, it’s why I’ve never read Jennifer Weiner’s books until now.

And yet, I heard from a lot of people that Mrs. Everything was excellent, so I read it. I immediately noticed the parallels between it and The Female Persuasion. In each, there are a series of female protagonists about whom you learn through the viewpoint of an omniscient narrator who switches between them. Both are sweeping in the amount of time they cover––from the 1960s to the present day. Both illustrate the benefits and pitfalls of first- and second-wave feminism through the stories of everyday women’s lives. In each, the characters are real and engaging.

After having read both, I found myself asking what’s the difference between The Female Persuasion and Mrs. Everything that would warrant such vastly different treatments by their publishers? Why is it that these two books have so much in common and yet one author is called “literary” and the other “chick lit”?

Jennifer Weiner has written countless essays about how labeling fiction written by women as chick lit is unhelpful at best and sexist at worst. Yet I’ve still heard dozens of people, even readers who claim to read a little bit of everything, shit on her books as if they’re not worthy of attention.

Here’s the thing, though: I thought The Female Persuasion was good, but I think Mrs. Everything is truly excellent. It’s about as perfect of a novel as I’ve read.

I don’t care whether it wins the National Book Award (though if it does, it’ll be well-deserved!), I stand by my opinion that Jennifer Weiner did it better. And I, like probably a lot of other readers out there, have been ignoring her for years because of the way her publisher has historically pigeonholed her.

Only one of the two books made me rush out to the library to put a hold on the rest of the author’s canon.

It made me think about what other books I’ve been avoiding when, besides how they’re marketed by the publisher, I know nothing about. Mostly, it’s made me wonder what other stories I’ve missed out on that I’d really enjoy. I try to read widely, though there are still some genres where I’m willfully ignorant––and I’d like to fix that.

What books or genres is this true for you? Is there a book or genre you’ve been pushing to the side for a while? Let me know in the comments!