Hosted by Felicia C. Sullivan
Participants: Roxana Robinson, Samantha Hunt, Holiday Reinhorn and Editor, Elizabeth Merrick

Felicia C. Sullivan: Is there a distinct divide between women who write chick lit and those who write literary fiction? In all fairness, have any of you actually read any chick lit? And how do you relate writers like Jane Austen, who some consider to be a chick lit writer to the chick lit writers of today. How can we close the gap so there is less of a rift (or is there?) between literary and chick lit? Are we as women our own worst enemies considering the male audience doesn't have quite such a divide? And finally, what motivated you to participate in this particular anthology?

Roxana Robinson: It’s not clear to me exactly where the division lies between “chick lit” and other fiction for, and by, women. If the definition has to do with plot, and if the plot concerns a young woman who finds the love of her life, then doesn’t it include Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre? Do I read chick lit? I don’t know. I’ve read all of Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte, and I’ve read The Diary of Bridget Jones, which I much enjoyed; I thought it was funny, lively and beguiling.

Samantha Hunt: The divide is not between men and women or even two camps of women writers. The divide is between art and marketing. In my opinion, the formulaic plots of most chick lit, while they might make a lot of money, do not make good art. There are a number of “how-to write a chick lit book” manuals. I want to read the kind of literature that couldn’t be written by following a how-to manual.

As for Jane Austen, she was not a chick lit writer. She was a writer dealing with the politics of her time: women as wampum and marriage, a business deal. She was activist on the part of romance.

Holiday Reinhorn: I have been confused by the mention of this divide from the beginning. It smells suspicious to me, as anything does that is a label, first because labels are a bore and second because they are really reductive. A good story is a good story and as long as it is well told, it will always find its audience, be it large or small. I imagine that the first writer who wrote the first book that was labeled “chick lit” after it came out, was not thinking of anything other than writing what was true to her to the best of her ability. She also had a great sense of what her readership could and would be and I say bully to that.

I agree with Roxana that it’s totally understandable for the publishing industry to be excited about a kind of book that tends to sell well commercially. The problem is when a type of book gets codified by content and the sex of its author and things start to be typecast by this notion and assumptions made about the values of who writes it.

I’m also suspicious because “male writing” and “male content” (whatever that is?!) is never categorized in this way by its genitalia or its themes. Cock lit and jock itch lit and stuff.

This discussion of the viability of “women’s content” is as old as the hills anyway. As an undergraduate, I sat through hours of male lit teachers describing Hemingway’s content as “big” and “epic” and Jane Austen’s content as being “domestic and small and interior and quaint.” Coincidence?

What really interests me is the opinion of the READER in this so-called “divide.” Are readers divided and how so? That’s what I’m really interested in and why I wanted to contribute to this anthology. i.e. Are readers arguing or is this just an insular argument among artists and critics and those whose job it is to market books?

When my collection came out in 2005 many female readers wrote in to my website to say that they thought the cover of my book was misleading and they were pissed off. They thought my book (mostly because it had leopard print on it) was designed to look like a chick lit cover and so when they bought and read the book it was not about “successful, interesting people like in chick lit books,” but instead was about “a bunch of alcoholic depressing losers.”

I thought this was really interesting. I mean aren’t all humans losers? Aren’t all books about “shopping for some sense of love and meaning” metaphorically at least? I mean you can shop for shoes in order to find love or you can fly fish and open cans of tuna with your teeth next to a campfire you built yourself in order to impress somebody. All characters in fiction are searching for love and meaning in the world even if they have no idea they are doing it. That why literature and stories of all genres are so interesting. As Ezra Pound would say: “Literature is news that stays news.”

Elizabeth Merrick: Chick lit as a genre arose out of a marketing scheme invented circa 1996--therefore it is ridiculous to categorize Austen as chick lit. Absurd. Maybe Jane Austen is tempted to shiv with a knitting needle from the great beyond the next person to suggest such preposterousness.

FCS: Let's talk about the role of publishing houses and marketing and sales executives who are positioning women writers. Is the term chick lit degrading and is it more about how these books are positioned rather than the actual content?

RR: Publishing houses are interested in what sells, and if they can link a new book to a successful trend, who can blame them? I don’t know if the term chick lit is degrading – I suspect people have very different opinions about it.

SH: I want American readers to be more courageous. Books can do things that movies and TV can’t and yet it seems so much of what it published nowadays fails to take advantage of this.

Is the term chick lit degrading? It is if you’re calling my books that. When I was a girl I couldn’t wait to become an adult. I wanted to wear caftans and sip martinis. (Think Elizabeth Taylor in Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Gloria Steinem, Susan Sontag, beautiful, smart, sexy women.) I wanted wisdom and control. I wanted to be an adult. How disappointing then to find that, now that I’ve reached adulthood, the qualities currently most prized in women are those belonging to the average sixteen year old. I don’t want to be a chick.

HR: I don’t think I would describe the term of chick lit as degrading per se. I just think that any terminology about product can be parochial and limiting and an artist’s job when telling stories is to disregard limits, hopefully.

EM: I'm not concerned with whether a book that isn't chick lit is being marketed as chick lit. I think the big issue in marketing books by women is that there is an urgent need for a marketing category of the Girl Genius book the way we have that Boy Genius category for Thomas Pynchon,  Jonathan Lethem/Franzen/Safran Foer, etc., and for this category to include the messy sexual, spiritual, still-in-the-margins feminine stories that are really fresh and coming to light after this sea change of the effects of feminism. Oprah's Book Club demonstrates a massive desire for this sort of book, yet mainstream publishing has yet to really understand even the bottom line potential for the desire for these stories, which I think is a very curious blind spot. 

FCS: This is an exciting time for women writers - all the women in the anthology come from disparate backgrounds, races, cultures, and all have a distinct voice and literary style. The field is far from homogenous. What, to you, is particularly exciting about women writing right now?

RR: Women writers are, in some ways, in a wonderful position. They’re writing about everything in the world; they’re published and they’re read. On the other hand, the critical response to women’s writing is disheartening. The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction has been awarded to 77 writers, of which 52 are male. Of the 59 National Book Award winners, 46 are male. Of the 26 PEN/Faulkner winners, 22 are male. Of the 61 winners of the Pushcart Prize, 2006, 41 are male. What are we to make of this?

SH: I am very happy to be a woman, always have been happy about it, but I must confess, I haven’t ever thought of myself as a woman writer, just a writer whose books will hopefully be read by women, men and anyone in between. And that is at the heart of my problem with chick lit. These novels address one rather particular slice of life, the young, unmarried woman. While I love young, unmarried women I am also interested in 86-year old crumpled men.

HR: I would agree that it’s a really exciting time for female authors of every stripe. What makes it particularly exciting is that we are having discussions like this one. Women’s writing as a topic of debate within a mass audience is great.

EM: We are about forty years into the massive sea change of this idea: men are not innately intellectually and artistically superior to women. Even the Bush White House would not (publicly) argue with this basic assumption. Yet it has only been in the mainstream for forty years--a blip! So this is the amount of time for a couple of generations of women artists to have permission to dive into territory that was on the margins for a very, very long time--what is our perspective? What stories do we tell given the chance? I think we have come so far in terms of general assumptions about gender equality that we forget how new this basic access is. And the incredible art coming out of this sea change is one of the gorgeous results.

FCS: We seem to be in an era where truth is a banishing commodity. We’re living in a country where truth about global warming, the war (as examples) gets lost in a barrage of misinformation and fear, and the truth has become less accessible. How important is it, in your opinion, that writers become intimately involved with politics? Books can be perceived as historical documents - can you talk on how and what writers can do to help bring truth up, via fiction or non-fiction, to the surface?

RR: I think fiction provides a great arena in which to explore the things that are happening around us, and that has always been true. I think politics – in a broad sense – are always part of the fiber of fiction. In my last novel, Sweetwater, I wrote about the natural world and the environment. I wanted to voice concerns about the frightening transformation we’re effecting, about the changes we’re effecting that may not be reversible. Part of what’s happening is taking place because a part of our population is determined not to acknowledge it, so I wrote about that, too – about how hard it is to have this conversation, how deeply invested people are on both sides of the argument, how hard it is to change people’s views, and how large the consequences of this may be.

Because fiction writers are always writing about the world around them, its texture, and what drives it, philosophically and politically, fiction does become a historical document. I spent some time at a scholars’ center once, and I talked to a German historian. I asked him what the most important sources were for his work, and he said, “Oh, the novels, of course. That’s what provides the real sense of that world – how people really lived, what they thought.”

I think he’s right. Fiction delivers the truest sense of our lives, of what troubles us, of what we think is funny, disturbing and frightening. Fiction writers try to deliver their own particular truth - and that’s the paradox of fiction, and it’s why fiction can, oddly enough, be more authentic than non-fiction. In writing non-fiction, by definition you must stick to the facts, and they may not be so obliging about delivering the truth you’re working at. So there’s a temptation to change things around a bit, to make the facts say what you want them to say. But in fiction there is no such problem: you create the facts, and the characters, and the scenes, which deliver the truth you are trying to tell. You can go further, dig deeper, be more explicit, more ruthless, more challenging, in fiction. You use your imagination and your creative powers to produce real people, and it’s real people, real stories, to which we respond at the most elemental level. We’re humans; these are stories about us.

Great fiction can be read on many levels. It contains truths about people’s intellectual lives as well as their emotional ones, observations about the landscape and the weather and the school system, about the food we eat and they way we feel about it, about our social lives and the clothes we wear. Chekhov was a passionate observer of the natural world, and concerned even then about the degradation of the environment – the cutting down of the great forests. In his long story, “The Steppe,” there are marvelous descriptions of the natural landscape, the animals and birds and vegetation on it that delivers a world we’ve lost.

And remember when Emma Bovary goes to the grand dinner party, and she notices that some of the women do not put their gloves in their wineglasses? I remember being electrified by this tiny unexplained fact. What could it mean? Why would a women put her glove in her wineglass? When I decided it was a signal to the waiter that she did not want wine, I felt as pleased as though I had deciphered a phrase of the Rosetta Stone. Another part of Emma’s world successfully acquired!

Whenever I read Trollope I watch for descriptions of meals. What they called dinner seemed to take place around four in the afternoon, and then there seems to be a bit more to eat – not much, sort of coffee and cookies – around nine at night, and then cards, or someone playing the piano, or maybe dancing. Trollope’s characters eat very little, compared to us. There’s a lawyer (in, I think, The Way We Live Now) whose office lunch consists of a single biscuit and a glass of sweet wine. I love knowing all these enlightening things; it allows me to inhabit the lives of these characters.

There’s an Irish-American character in a Mary Gordon novel, who remembers life in a small Irish village – all the cows coming down the narrow stone-paved street twice a day, and the stink and mess of the manure they left, and her disgust at it. These are small but electrifying facts, and they deliver information we need. These are the rivets and nails of fiction, and they offer us as much deep connection to the characters as do the larger feelings of rapture and heartbreak and epiphany, which are the engines.

All this information is delivered through close, close observation. And this is one of the tasks of the fiction writer: the closest possible observation. We’re trying to deliver true life, in all its aspects.

HR: I don’t know if truth, or the telling of it by those in power has ever been at the top of the list in human history as it is evolving, but I agree, it really feels like we are living on the brink of some serious destruction right now. In the end, truth is so subjective and the interior lives of people are so conflicted that literature becomes the perfect historical document. The reason for this is that fiction is about contradiction –personal AND external contradiction and the intersection of the two. It is about emotional and physical disorder. Personally, this is why novels and stories and plays survive the way they do throughout the centuries because interpretation is fluid and human problems are timeless and open ended. There is no beginning and there is no end to human confusion and the quest for redemption. Works of non-fiction and journalism are under an obligation of objectivity and adherence to facts which doesn’t apply to fiction. It is a free roamer and this appeals to the human spirit more than anything, I would think. It also has no obligation to please anyone and it often incites people, so it is effortlessly political. This is why Hamlet outlasts Helter Skelter. The act of telling a story is the most political act one can commit really, story tellers and their characters say and do things that traditionally are kept silent, storytellers never shut up which is the reason why writers are usually among the first to be killed in a coup d’etat or whatever.

I think that literature’s job has always been both directly and indirectly revolutionary so writers don’t have to try to be political. All stories embody the ambient cultural politic effortlessly in one way or another even if they are dramatizing the lack of it. If you agree to sit in a room alone all day and make things up from nothing. If you’d rather spend time with your imaginary friends and barely take showers and make a pretty up and down living for the most part, that already makes you pretty “off” anyway.

FCS: Perhaps share with our readers more about your own books, literary careers, influences (past and current), teachers, mentors, those who have shaped your work.

RR: One of my teachers at college was Bernard Malamud. He was a dry, careful man, balding, with a small grey mustache. He wore v-neck sweaters over striped shirts, khaki pants. He was a conscientious teacher, exact, precise and very frugal with his praise. He was emphatic about method and discipline, telling us that he wrote every morning at a certain time, that there was no such thing as inspiration, that what we had to look forward to was hard work. It was not a surprise, but it was very useful to hear.

I loved a certain line of English fiction writers: Woolf, of course, and E.M. Forster, Henry Green, Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Taylor, William Trevor (Anglo-Irish). These writers wrote elegantly and impeccably, and I could trust them absolutely: their beautiful sentences always paced the way into an exquisitely rendered narrative. I loved their attention to the rhythm of sentences and to the sound of words. I loved their close observation - of the drawing room, the garden, the breakfast, the death. I loved the way they combined beauty and tragedy, or beauty and comedy - I loved the the fact that they considered beauty to be an essential part of writing. And I loved their close attention to the life of the heart. These were the writers - Updike, I think, is part of that tradition - who taught me to write, who offered me a literary model.

The greatest influence on my actual writing, though, came from John Updike, whose short stories I read year after year in The New Yorker, marveling, each time, at their crystalline perfection of form and language, by the generosity and compassion that informed them.

SH: I have always been inspired by the mysterious. Janet Cardiff, Rupert Sheldrake, the Arctic regions, Kelly Link, Shelley Jackson, the ocean, Haruki Murakami, Sophie Calle, W.G. Sebald, William Faulkner, Maria Mitchell, Luddites and Primitivists, Mother Nature. I’m inspired by artists, writers and scientists who reveal a mystery and then, rather than solving it, simply stand back and let us see the wonder. Mystery that is unsolvable. Both of my novels, The Seas and a forthcoming book called The Invention of Everything Else, try to explore such mysteries: identity to a young girl from a small town, living underwater, death, dictionaries, Nikola Tesla, electricity, love, how pigeons always know their ways home.

HR: My two greatest living inspirations as writers and as teachers are Barry Hannah and Marilynne Robinson. As people and as writers, they lead from the heart. Always the most timeless and political act of all.

EM: My biggest literary influences have been Louise Erdrich and Toni Morrison, whose work I always go back to. And who are usually outside the realm of this sort of "what state is the novel in now" discussion that pops up from time to time.  Morrison's work is so major and recognized that of course she was one of the two women in that recent New York Times bit on influential novels of the past 25 years, but the huge influence of her work, or how she shifted the form of the novel to a new zone--this is rarely acknowledged in these sort of public literary discussions. That category of Authoritative Big Novelist tends still of course to go to DeLillo, Pynchon, various Jonathans, etc. White dudes writing--often very, very well--about white dudes, for the most part. I think that this subtle shut-out has to do with Morrison and Erdrich writing far outside the white urban upper/middle class, and also with the centrality of spirituality (in a very matter-of-fact, everyday way, not a Graham Greene tortured genius kind of way) to their work. I get a sense that still among the intelligentsia, reviewers, etc.,  that if there is this sort of spirituality involved in a novel or a body of literary work (especially if it is removed from the white mainstream) it must not be serious work, it must not be capable of holding its own in terms of ideas or intellect with kind of work more traditionally thought of as a Great Book. But for me this is the realm that is the most interesting to work in right now.

Also I've had many wonderful teachers--from early on the wonderful novelists Susan Power and Tom Perrotta have been huge influences.

Read Small Spiral Notebook's review of This is Not Chick Lit.

Visit the This is Not Chick Lit Web site.

Visit Elizabeth Merrick's Web site.

Roxana Robinson is the author of seven books: three novels, three short-story collections, and a biography of Georgia O’Keeffe. Her most recent book is the collection A Perfect Stranger. Robinson was named a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Four of her books were named Notable Books of the Year by The New York Times. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, One Story, Daedalus, Best American Short Stories, The New York Times, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City and teaches at the New School.

Samantha Hunt is the author of two books, The Seas, and The Invention of Everything Else, a novel about the life of Nikola Tesla that will be published Fall 2007. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney's, Cabinet, Seed Magazine, Jubilat, Hobart, and on the radio program This American Life.

Holiday Reinhorn is the author of Big Cats: Stories. She is a recipient of the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction and a Carl Djerassi Fiction Fellowship from the Creative Writing Institute at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Holiday's stories have appeared in Zoetrope, Tin House, Ploughshares and Columbia, among others. She lives in Los Angeles where she is currently working on a novel.

Elizabeth Merrick is the author of Girly, a novel. She received a B.A. from Yale, an M.F.A. from Cornell, and an M.A. in Creativity and Art Education from San Francisco State as well as fellowships from the Saltonstall Foundation, Ragdale Foundation, and VCCA. Her essay on the beauty and cosmetic surgery appears in Jane in August, and she has been quoted as an authority on women's and literary issues for national and regional media like Elle and Time Out New York. She has taught at New York University and Cornell, and currently lives in New York where she is a writing coach and consultant. She also directs the Grace Reading Series which she founded in 2005.