From an e-news article at the guardian.co.uk

Recently I’ve read a lot of reviews of Pamela Druckerman’s book French Children Don’t Throw Food. And one thing that many of them mention is the fact that French mothers just tend to get on with doing things their way. They have the kinds of births they want with all the pain relief they want, they bottle-feed their children if they want to, and they certainly don’t spend hours on internet forums criticising each other’s parenting choices.

Reading Decca Aitkenhead’s interview with Sophie Kinsella in yesterday’s Guardian, I remembered this, and wondered whether French women also care less than British women about what other French women read? I’ve no idea but I do hope so. Because as a publisher of commercial women’s fiction, I seem to spend an awful lot of time these days reading articles by intelligent women asking – as Aitkenhead’s piece yesterday did – things like “why a woman of [Kinsella’s] intelligence would want to write about women at their silliest”. And why other women would read it. Aitkenhead wonders whether “it was the only way to make big money”, and is evidently looking for an “acknowledgment of conflict” in the fact that Kinsella is Oxbridge-educated and also writes commercial books that millions of readers enjoy reading. Readers and writers of women’s fiction on Twitter felt predictably patronised.

To use the formulation beloved of “chick lit” heroine Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but wonder how much of this sort of fiction Aitkenhead has actually read. She describes both Jane Eyre and Allison Pearson’s Kate Reddy as “klutzy”; neither is anything of the sort. Jane Eyre is a quiet, good, sensible woman struggling with a very passionate love. Kate Reddy is a highly intelligent, highly organised woman struggling with the demands of working parenthood. Some of Sophie Kinsella’s heroines do indeed have silly and ditzy aspects (though some of them also do not) but that’s no surprise: she is writing comic fiction, and brilliant comic fiction at that. Why her books are so successful is no mystery – it is because she is one of the very best writers of this type and millions of women and possibly even (gasp) a few men have recognised that fact, and buy her books. Aitkenhead is correct that much in this genre is written by educated women, and this is because most books are written by educated people. Educated people, for obvious reasons, tend to write more confidently and therefore produce better books. The bigger question is: why is so much energy expended on patronising this particular area of the market?

What publishers know very well, and what the “chick lit is fluff” lobby often forgets, is that book jackets are decisions made by publishers. We decide what a book looks like and this is a complicated decision, influenced by what we think looks good, what we think will position the book most clearly in the marketplace, and how best to signal quickly to both retailers and readers what kind of book it is. The downside of this labelling process is that a whole range of completely different books get lumped together and confused. The only thing that “these books” really have in common is that they’re written primarily by women and about relationships. Apart from that, they encompass as wide a range as any other genre. Kinsella and Jennifer Weiner, say, have no more in common than do Alan Hollinghurst and Jonathan Franzen, or Lee Child and Mark Billingham. But I’ve yet to read an article in which either of the latter two pairs have had to defend their difference from one another and the rest of the genre, or engage in hand-wringing analysis about why their books sell so well.

What I kept thinking of, reading Decca Aitkenhead’s piece, was the question Caitlin Moran’s How to be a Woman suggests we all ask ourselves on a regular basis, and that is, “Are the men doing this?” Why do I so often hear intelligent, educated women admitting that they read commercial women’s fiction, but only as a “guilty pleasure”? Are there millions of clever men out there feeling guilty about reading John Grisham? Why are Jane Eyre, Kate Reddy and Becky Bloomwood even being discussed together in the same paragraph? They have nothing at all in common apart from being female characters created by female authors.

Decca Aitkenhead admits that the chick lit debate has been on a “literary loop” for the last 20 years. So here’s how to close that loop: let everyone read what they enjoy reading and stop sneering about others’ literary choices.

Jenny Geras is editorial director for fiction at Pan Macmillan

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/14/chick-lit-problem-name

PIcture courtesy of : http://www.illustrationartist.in/commisioned-illustrations/book-cover-illustration.shtml