With her new novel, Feminista, author Erica Kennedy seeks to use Zamora's story as a springboard to pioneer a brand new genre: "bitch lit." And not a moment too soon. Chick lit, the popular and fluffy genre geared toward women readers, is having a bit of an identity crisis. Even Plum Sykes, of Bergdorf Blondes fame, is ready to throw in the towel on the genre:

[Sykes] was skeptical that a new genre of chick lit could emerge from the recession, partly because she believes we've already seen the last of the "sex and shopping book as a publishing phenomenon". She added: "Chick lit seems so out of date now. Not only because of the economic reality but because it's been done to death."

The recession hit, taking the sugary tales of credit card backed retail therapy with it and leaving authors in a panic. Would people still relate to their characters if they stopped living charmed lives? For some reason, publishers seem to think "recessionista reads" are the next hot trend. I'm fairly skeptical, myself - after all, half the fun of a fluffy novel is the escape from reality.

Lakshmi Chaudhry agrees in a sense, writing for LiveMint.com:

The literary problem with the current economic debacle is that its architects are irremediably inane, self-absorbed and shallow-and, therefore, perfect for chick lit-the first fictional genre to wholeheartedly embrace the recession. Hedge Fund Wives by Tatiana Boncompagni, Social Lives by Wendy Walker, The Penny Pinchers Club by Sarah Strohmeyer and The Summer Kitchen by Karen Weinreb detail the travails of affluent women suddenly burdened with shrinking bank balances and AWOL or, worse, imprisoned banker husbands.

What's a Fifth Avenue socialite to do? Tap into her girl power, of course. "One of the big motifs in these books is a sort of empowerment," says Jonathan Segura, an editor at Publishers Weekly, who told The New York Times, "Swathed in Gucci, Prada and what not, their protagonists realign their priorities and realize, ‘Oh, I don't need that Givenchy gown. I can look great in Eileen Fisher, too'". Sacrifice, it's the American way!

But is that what readers want? Listening to the whine of the formerly privileged whose recent brush with brokeness forced them to reflect on the meaning of life seems more like torture than pleasure. And our current cultural mood seems to go between more serious matters (like politics and the economy) with straight up escapism (werewolves, faeries, and vamps, oh my!)

Perhaps writers and publishers could pay more attention to the lives of the women that create their audience. Many of us are scared for our jobs and cutting back, but that doesn't manifest in maniacal penny pinching or schadenfreude. Some times, tapping into this particular type of economic strain, is as simple as allowing your character's thoughts to roam. A good example of this is a highly relateable passage in Feminista:

Sydney had no desire to be that rich. Every rich kid she'd ever known had been completely fucked in the head. She didn't even aspire to be average rich, but seeing that kind of obscene wealth up close made her life seem so small and insignificant. For the last month, she had been agonizing, agonizing, over whether she should waste three hundred dollars on a pair of fucking shoes! She compulsively saved her pennies, never splurging on herself unless she could write it off, and for what? To buy a tiny apartment that was the size of that spoiled bitch's linen closet?

She used to think that if she just had enough, she'd be happy. Enough money in the bank, a decent apartment, a little disposable income to go on a modest vacation or two a year. After reading a widely e-mailed Times story about $200,000 being the new $100,000, she had to ask herself what exactly constituted enough? Before she had finished grappling with that question, the paper of record ran a chilling piece about millionaires in Silicon Valley who didn't feel rich because they lived among people who had tens of millions. Before clicking to the second page, Sydney had to stop and pop a Xanax. The quest for "enough" was what got her out of bed every morning. It was what kept her going when she wanted to give away all of her worldly possessions and move to a tropical island and sell handmade trinkets on the beach. She didn't want to ponder the idea that "enough" was unattainable, that it was a constantly moving goal she might never reach. Because that would force her to confront the possibility that her entire life's course had been charted with a faulty compass. And why put herself through that when she could just self-medicate?

Whether it's chick lit or bitch lit, romance novels or paranormal smut, the key to any selling any story lies in sympathetic characters and the willingness of an audience to want to walk through the world created between a novel's pages.

So, I suppose, the fate of chick lit rests squarely on one key question: what is the audience looking for?

Feminista [Amazon]
End of a chapter: chick lit takes on the credit crunch [The Independent]
Sex and shopping chick lit makes way for recessionista reads as credit crunch leaves its mark on the book shelves [Daily Mail]
How the recession has fuelled chick lit [Live Mint]
Paranormal Smut Novels [Feministe]

In her essay on Double X, author Sarah Bliston says, "like many American businesses, chick-lit must reinvent itself - fast - if it's going to survive." And in a way it's doing so. In a slightly annoying article ("contrition is the new black") for the Times, Ruth La Ferla describes new books like The Penny Pinchers Club, in which a woman resorts to dumpster-diving when she fears her husband is about to divorce her, and The Summer Kitchen, whose heroine goes back to work after her husband's arrest. And in Publisher's Weekly, Doree Shafrir mentions Mercury in Retrograde, which features a character forced to fend for herself after a lifetime of relying on her parents.

On the one hand, these books would seem to champion a new self-reliance not present in more traditional, catch-the-man novels. Shafrir quotes Greer Hendricks, editor of Mercury in Retrograde, who says,

These women were really getting a life. It's really about friendship and self-acceptance and getting your act together. It's about the life, not the guy.

These tales of women overcoming obstacles to live independently of men and their bank accounts certainly sound inspiring — except that the obstacles aren't really that big. In fact, it seems that divorce and financial devastation usually cause the heroines to do something fun and hip that they really wanted to do anyway. When her parents take away her credit cards, Mercury in Retrograde's Lena "Lipstick" Lippencrass "discovers a talent for fashion design" — that noted path to financial security. The heroine of The Summer Kitchen is "forced to open a bakery," also usually a capital-intensive and uncertain enterprise, at least in the real world. And Jill Kargman's The Ex-Mrs. Hedgefund, has its heroine, post-divorce, "picking up the threads of a career built on her first love, rock 'n' roll." These women don't have to scrimp and save in menial jobs — instead, they embark on glamorous careers, with the implication that their lives are now more fulfilling than they were in the days of easy marital money.

This idea of salvation through reduced circumstances — the concept that having less disposable income will help us focus on what's really important and perhaps even become better people — has been around since at least the beginning of the recession, and probably long before. But the key word is disposable. Describing the post-recession edits she made to her book Sleepless Nights, Bliston says,

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.

And author Sarah Strohmeyer tells the Times about curbing her own overspending. "I mean," she says, "how many more napkin rings can you buy?" The new, recession-era chick lit may tell the stories of women who pare away the fat in their lives to find true happiness, but this is a lot easier if there's some fat to begin with. Broadsheet's Amy Benfer writes that the heroines' newer, leaner lives still "reflect the kinds of decisions that those of us who spent the boom years wondering if we could ever afford a mortgage on an average professional salary before our 65th birthdays might still find a bit out of touch with reality." After all, "one can lose the home in Aspen and the five-tiered cakes and still be a good long way from foreclosure on one's primary residence and clipping coupons for Kraft macaroni and cheese."

And while "losing a home in Aspen" might indeed force someone to focus on what's truly valuable in life, getting laid off and losing health insurance don't usually give people "a splash of excitement and energy." For women outside the hedge fund set, especially those who've been out of the workforce for a while, divorce can mean a plunge into poverty, not a launch into a new and exciting career. Benfer writes that chick lit about wealthy women might "appeal to the aspirational fantasies" of readers (that word again), and that these fantasies may have helped get us into this financial mess in the first place. And Amy Sohn, author of the new novel Prospect Park West, says, "The book is really about the perils of aspiration," and of a life that is "always about the next thing, trading up." Not every woman is able to trade up, but chick lit may be, in part, about wanting to, and this may not be such a good thing.

The chick lit genre doesn't deserve across-the-board opprobrium — at their best, these novels can be witty and wise, and their popularity supports many a female writer. But chick lit writers may be unconsciously buying into women's magazine culture, with its idea that reading should inspire desire — for more stuff, or, in the new, recession-era formulation, for a life that is glamorous even in fallback mode. It's neither realistic nor necessary to ask that writers produce only what Benfer calls "Great and Difficult works of art," or that all chick lit novels be about unmitigated pain and suffering. But, as author Gigi Levangie Grazer says, "the idea that having the right bag buys you happiness-now that's dark." And there's something dark, too, about the notion that even in a recession, heroines need to be better off than their readers. Do chick lit consumers want to read about working-class families dealing with layoffs, or women who find fulfillment in jobs that aren't traditionally "cool"? We don't know, because those books aren't being written — yet.

More Gumption, Less Gucci [New York Times]
Chick-literati [Financial Times]
Women's Lit: Chick Lit Gets An Update [Publishers Weekly]
The Death Of Chick Lit [Double X]
The Devil Wears Old Navy [Broadsheet]

Showalter, one of the country's founders of feminist literary criticism, has written a sweeping work on the history of female writers in America, A Jury of Her Peers. Their story is a fraught one and not, as the Economist puts it, "a history of inevitable progress." While female writers have flourished since the country's inception - and, indeed, the 19th century literary marketplace was dominated by them - their success has been at the whim of society. The macho ethos of the Modernists, with it explicit attempt to make American writing "more energetic and masculine" made the early 20th century particularly unfriendly to women writers. (Gertrude Stein, on whom she piles "boring/unreadable" scorn, was apparently an exception - if not a positive one - to this rule. Patronage doesn't count?)

Showalter also makes the point that for the female writer, the private and public are more inexplicably entwined: in prior centuries, this was a practical concern, and more recently and problematically, the romanticism seemed necessary to give women writers viability. In Showalter's view, the female writer of today has moved beyond sexist prejudice. We hope so; certainly there seems to be a baffling tendency to romanticize the glory days of literary culture - be it 20's Paris or 50's New York - and unfortunately this involves a tiresome degree of patronizing misogyny. Any glance at a literary bestseller list, however, shows definitively that female writers are, if anything, in a position of prominence at the moment - and many, like Mary Gaitskill or Anne Patchett, seem free of a prior generation's need to shed all traces of "the feminine" in their writing, while still being accepted as "writers" rather than "women writers." However, the landscape is nothing if not a shifting one. Will a new climate mean a need for comfort? And if so, how will we define it? Hopefully with a desire for good reading, without the labels.

A Paean To The Female Pen[Economist]

We're certainly willing to believe book clubs — like any club, particularly one designed to illustrate aesthetics - can be fraught.

One member may push for John Updike, while everyone else is set on John Grisham. One person wants to have a glass of wine and talk about the book, while everyone else wants to get drunk and talk about their spouses. “There are all these power struggles about what book gets chosen,” Ms. Burg said. Then come the complaints: “It’s too long, it’s too short, it’s not literary enough, it’s too literary ... ”

An upswing in the number of book groups has apparently necessitated the need for something called a "professional book-group facilitator" who charges $250 to $300 per member for her mediating services. People quoted in the piece complain about narcissists who hog the floor, competitive refreshments, bans on political talk, oversharers and domineering "ayatollahs."

Sure, this is why some of us don't join book groups - my mom, for instance, finds them unbearable. But, and this is what the Times piece doesn't address, it's exactly why some of us do! Most people can read on their own and even put together some kind of high-minded booklist. But the point of a social gathering, as much as sharing opinions and stimulating thought, is the thrill of other personalities, with their idiosyncrasies, their occasional pomposity, their quirks. Petty? Maybe — but there is a place for this. As in a good college class, a discussion is often enlivened by the presence of someone smart but insufferable or another who goes on bizarre tangents. Isn't this, after all, what human contact is — and part of the point of taking a chance on a group of strangers? In a sense, the article's taking on several different issues — social friction and intellectual dissonance — and pretending they're the same. Yes, it would be irritating to find a club was out of synch with one's interests...but can't you determine that beforehand rather than joining a group only to sneer at the other members? Whereas personality conflict is inevitable, this other sort of disappointment seems fairly avoidable — certainly the nastiness is. The bibliophile profiled at the beginning of the article may have left her group in a dissatisfied huff, but I'm willing to bet the rest of the circle heaved a hearty sigh of relief. And I'd kind of like to have heard their side.

Fought Over Any Good Books Lately? [New York Times]

This is, not surprisingly, becoming an issue with authors who regard their work as more than beach reads. But Shipley sites several authors who try to buck this trivializing trend and lose; having found a winning formula, the publishing industry, which everyone knows to be in shaky shape in the best of economic climates, is taking no chances.

Shipley concludes that, bored by the number of identical-looking choices, we're going to experience a backlash. Doubtful; homogeneity has never hurt genre fiction like Romance and SciFi, and people looking for fun escapism are unlikely to be repelled by an increasing number of options. They are, however, likely to be disappointed when they get to the beach and find that instead of some heartwarming bit of froth they've ended up with Serious Fiction full of incest and substance abuse.

Yes, I can see why a serious writer would be irritated by what is most definitely misrepresentation (and Shipley's at pains to point out that this kind of branding now extends even to the work of male writers whose stories involve female protagonists.) But in a sense, they should regard this commercial branding as a vote of confidence: to my layman's eye, it means a publisher thinks it might actually sell. It seems to me (and this owes way more to my time in bookstores and on Amazon than my foray into the publishing world) that there's a fairly clear divide between "serious" fiction, and that which actually sells, and unless you're Cormac McCarthy or Annie Proulx, never the twain shall meet. A few Iowa grads on the roster with serious covers might spell prestige, but that's not where anyone's bread is buttered. There seems to be a feeling in our society now that if something's fun — be it movie or novel — it isn't Serious. Serious things are punishment, full of lives of quiet desperation and family tragedies — albeit repressed, undramatic ones. If you're having too much fun, you're not being intellectual. Yes, I'm oversimplifying and there are certainly exceptions that prove rules, almost exclusively by men, who probably have an easier time being taken seriously as bon-vivant wits without sacrificing literary cred. But nowadays there are far fewer Laurie Colwins or Barbara Pyms — great writers who happen to use levity as a medium — and if there are, it's hard to know because they're hidden under pink covers with lounging, thoughtful women on them. Oh, well; if good books are medicine, and you can't blame people for preferring it Pepto-Bismol colored.
The Great Chick Lit Cover Up [The Guardian]
Related:

Brand-Obsessed Chick Lit Makes Us Lose Our Breakfast (At Tiffany's)
Blogging Towards Bethlehem

Imagine that! She compares Truman Capote's classic Breakfast at Tiffany's to Sunday and the other Capote also-rans and discovers to no one's surprise that these new books are entirely (tacky) style and zero substance.

"This summer’s brand-flogging novels also reveal a kind of empty clink at the bottom of fashion’s well," Horyn noted. "Is that all there is? Has the fashion plot thinned to such a degree that it’s just about presenting life as a blue velvet ring box or a giant Birkin bag?"

Horyn tries to figure out why women continue to buy these books. Is all this name dropping aspirational? Harper Collins editor Jonathan Burnham says, "The audience [for these brand-heavy books] is Middle American women looking to buy a taste of the glittering East Coast experience, with all the silliness," while another editor says that like glamorous movies during the Depression, these books provide a glittery salve for those struggling with pedestrian struggles like mortgages.

Really? If my house were being foreclosed on and I started reading a book about basically empty women who are blowing thousands of dollars on gaudy couture, it would not distract me from my plight. It would make me want to punch these fictional harridans directly in the cooch. Which is sort of how I felt when I read this quote from Vogue's Plum Sykes, whose Bergdorf Blondes was a bestseller when it came out in 2004. "Using all those brand names is sort of bizarre,” said Ms. Sykes. “At the time that ‘Bergdorf Blondes’ and ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ came out, it seemed so modern. Now it seems old-fashioned.” Oh yes Plum, you invented brand name dropping eons ago, and now that all the plebes have caught on, it's so desperately out of touch!

Anyway, although the venerable Ms. Sykes hath declared brand-name dropping "old-fashioned," Lauren Weisberger's Chasing Harry Winston, which is chock-full of expensive accessories, has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 13 weeks so far. Clearly we can't beat 'em, so we might as well join 'em: mark your calendar for my forthcoming novel, Humping Hermès Scarves to hit book stores in the summer of 2010!

And the Plot Thinned ... [New York Times]

Earlier: Young Adult Novels Plumb New Depths Of Product Placement
Blogging Towards Bethlehem

Because your novel has female protagonists and a baby blue cover, it seems that some people have categorized it as chick lit, which felt reductive to me.
It is reductive! It’s also dismissive. “Chick lit” is a catch all for everything that’s not “hard” literature written by a woman. It implies that the male experience is universal, while the female experience is something only other women would be interested in. Even Joyce Carol Oates’ last book got the disembodied female head cover treatment! I understand where the term comes from – [books about] female protagonists looking for love in the big city – but my book has nothing to do with finding a man. Companies know that women are really the only ones who still buy books, which is good, but there has to be a better way to market them.

Speaking of labels, your book has been called feminist by several reviewers, and one of the three main characters, Margaret, runs a failing feminist ‘zine called Snatch. Did you set out to make a markedly feminist statement?
I didn’t sit down to write a feminist manifesto. But no, “feminism” specifically didn’t come to mind. I wanted to write a book about women’s relationship to decision-making and self image, about female identity, and what being a woman means to three different age groups. I did found a feminist zine [the proto-Jezebelian Maxi ] in the 90s though.

I related to Margaret’s struggles with Snatch, particularly her difficulty reconciling artistic freedom with the need to make money. There’s a scene at the beginning where a very broke Margaret goes to a birthday dinner for one of her more successful friends. They end up going to a very expensive restaurant and Margaret gets shamed into paying much more than she could afford. I’ve definitely lived that uncomfortable scene more than once.
Me too. There’s always this awkward shuffle around the bill. Money definitely creates this imbalance, especially because in creative worlds it seems like it flows so easily and quickly, particularly when you’re not the one getting it. When I graduated from college in the 90s, there was this feeling that we’d all just be starving artists and listen to Nirvana and that was great. And Margaret wants to be pure in her artistic vision and anti-capitalist, but part of her gets completely sucked in against her will. It’s hard not to when you see all these people earning so much money. It seems like it’s right there and you can’t get it. It warps one’s sense of life and ambition and success.

Margaret’s fraught relationship with her wealthy parents also seemed to shape her feelings about capitalism. She never want to be a stay at home mother and depend on a man, the way Janice did.
She’s definitely set up her own life in opposition to her parents’ choices. She’s let that dictate her moral stances. What I really wanted to show with Margaret’s relationship to her mother, Janice, was that every woman has been shaped by what their mothers do and who they are. Some people adopt Margaret’s “fuck you” stance, and others follow their mothers’ paths, but we’re all still reacting to what we observed growing up.
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything [Amazon]
In Every Dream Home, A Heartache [Salon]
Janelle Brown [Official Site]

Earlier: Blogging Towards Bethlehem

To be sure, some of the books reviewed in Maslin's article are the bread and butter of the chick lit genre, like Lauren Weisberger's Chasing Harry Winston, with its "caipirinha-soaked" trio of materialistic harpies, she conceded. "But why do Birkin and Everything get thrown into the slush pile with the marriage-minded messes? And some of these books, despite their female friendly plots, must be better than others, mustn't they?" she wondered, pushing a lock of sun-bleached hair behind her ear. "So why are they all thrown into the same catch-all review?"

She toggled back to the front page of the books section and sighed deeply. Of the seventeen other articles on the books index, only two were about works written by women. Dejected, she crawled back into the fuchsia ghetto of the Styles section to read more stories about sunglasses.

On the Beach, Under A Tiffany-Blue Sky [NY Times]
Bringing Home Birkin [Amazon]
All We Ever Wanted Was Everything [Amazon]

As long as I've been aware, I've had hemorrhoids. For many, many years I thought I couldn't say anything. Because hemorrhoids only grow on grandfathers. I always found them to be so un-girly. I was so often at the proctologist because of them! But he advised me to leave them alone as long as they weren't causing me any pain. That they didn't do. They just itched. For that, my proctologist Dr. Fiddel gave me an ointment.

For the external itching, you squeeze a hazelnut-sized amount onto your the finger with the shortest nail and rub it on your pink starfish. The tube also comes with a point attachment with many rings inside, so that you can feed it into your ass and squirt it in there, thereby quieting the internal itching.

Before I had that kind of cream, I'd scratched so determinedly in and around my asshole in my sleep that the next morning I would have a quarter-sized dark brown spot in my underwear. As I said: very un-girly.

My hemorrhoids look really special. Over the course of the years, they'd forced themselves more and more out of my asshole. Now they are cloud-like flaps of skin once around my whole pink starfish that look like an anemone's tentacles. Dr. Fiddel calls it the cauliflower.

He says that if I want it gone, it would only be for aesthetics. He'll only remove it for people that are really burdened by it. Good reasons would be if my lover didn't like it or if my cauliflower made me anxious about sex. That I wouldn't admit.

If someone loves me or is even only hot for me, then my cauliflower shouldn't play a role. Besides, I have already for many years — since I was 15 until now, and I'm 18 — despite my wild cauliflower had successful anal sex. Successful, for me, means I came, even though there was a cock only in my ass and nobody was playing with any other part of me. Yeah, I'm proud of that.

Phew. I guess I know what I'm doing tonight. I think I'll need a cigarette, though.

Just as Gould is infuriated by all those "Scary Sadshaws," wandering around in search of baubles and boys... [I find it] maddening to have to wonder — Carrie Bradshaw-style — if Gould's story would have run had she not been beautiful, and maddening to then hate oneself for having had to wonder that at all.

But perhaps most maddening is the way the buildup of critical attention to a piece like Gould's — or to a cultural phenomenon like "SATC" — only affirms that certain kinds of women, and only those kinds of women, are worth elevating to begin with, in part because of the delight people take in tearing them down.

And this:

No matter how angry you felt about Gould's piece, it was almost impossible to read the comments and not feel terrible: for her, about her, and about yourself for having even peeked. The process is exhausting, and not good for anyone, especially women who get stuck with some lame avatar they feel does not represent them, but whom they do not particularly feel like burning at the stake just for having been clever, lucky or talented enough to wind up drawing a spotlight.

Another Pretty Face Of A Generation [Salon]
Related: The Times Magazine Dapples Sunlight On Its Memoirist [NY Observer]
Exposed [NY Times Magazine]


Earlier: 5 Things About That Times Magazine Piece On Masturbatory Blogging
The Problem With Chick Lit

KERRY COHEN can barely remember all of the 40-odd men she's slept with...

Well, Jesus Christ. Fortysomething. Memory repress a few off that list and you've got something approaching 37, which would be your age, Kerry, and that would be "too old to have learned the meaning of the word 'promiscuous' from Timbaland feat. Nelly Furtado." You know, I have this theory about people who think some grave injustice has occurred when they find out some dude with whom they had a one night stand doesn't actually care about them, and it's sort of the same theory I have about people who generate two separate memoirs without actually doing anything particularly memorable. But I try to give sluts the benefit of the doubt, which is why I consulted the "About Kerry" section of Kerry's two separate personal websites and...

Kerry loves learning. She loves books and lively, passionate discussions. She loves delving deep inside a subject and pulling up the hidden pieces. She loves to see the connections between things. For these reasons, college was a fantastic time for Kerry. And, the social life wasn't too shabby either...As time went on, Kerry's writing matured, melded, and took on new meaning, as all work does when you keep at it. Kerry started to write Easy when Ezra was 11 months old and somehow managed to keep writing between nursies, trips to the park, colds, cuddles, and being dragged by the hand around the house. This is the thing about being a writer: it doesn't matter what else comes. Like breathing, you do it. You don't know how else to live.

My first book - all writers have such a first book, don't they? - was titled "Poop and Pee." Each page showed private body parts urinating and defecating. Inexplicably, one page showed a penis defecating. The images were wordless, until the final page where I wrote, simply, "sniff-sniff." Sort of brilliant, I think.

While any novel is better when it considers the perspectives of both men and women, how many examples of classic literature have the reverse problem — that the female characters lack substance and exist only as foils for the men? Any Hemingway novel suffers from this malady; Philip Roth's female characters are a joke and even the more modern Romeos of literary wunderkinds like Ben Kunkel have trouble creating fictional women with any staying power. And yet these novels still manage to get to the pinnacle of the literary pantheon, while any female writer who writes mostly about women and their issues is relegated to the pink ghetto with a fuschia cover and a pair of heels.

And anyway, it's a widely accepted fact that men don't buy books in the first place. Are women more likely to buy something because it's pink? I want to believe that this is untrue, but then again Confessions of a Shopaholic, that carnation-hued mess, was purchased by millions so what do I know?

Weiner Is Talented Enough To Aim Higher [Philadelphia Inquirer via Galley Cat]
'Certain Girls': It's Not A Sure Thing [USA Today]

Hahahaha, I found something. It was a crap email I received recently from a particularly exasperating dude. 44.44% FEMALE. Just for fun, I tested the exasperated email I sent him back: 81.16% MALE. Pyhrric victory if there ever motherfucking was one, but still.

Gender Guesser

Listen, I'm not hating on these women for using their considerable connections to accomplish their creative goals, but why is it that of all the "chick lit" books that hit the shelves every month, those written by or about socialites and urging conspicuous consumption the only ones that get any press?

Earlier this year, NYC society doyenne Holly Peterson, daughter of the chairman of the Blackstone group wrote an aggressively mediocre book called The Manny, made a YouTube video with her rich friends to accompany it, all followed by mentions in the New York Times Sunday Styles, and the New Yorker.

What's curious also is that in the Bazaar profile, Goldberg and Harper choose a Jenni Kayne dress as one of their fashion picks. Kayne, a rising designer, was the subject of the Bazaar "Personal Style" feature just two months ago. She is also the daughter of the wealthy LA elite, and counts Rachel Zoe and the Olsen twins as members of her inner circle. Kayne told the L.A. Times last year, "My dad happens to be really good at what he does, and he has been successful (her father is a high profile investment banker). But my parents are not socialites, and I'm not a socialite. I've found articles online where they compare me to Nikki Hilton. I think she's a really nice girl, but that's not me." Tell it to Tory Burch, sister.

There are so many excellent books written and clothes by women who don't happen to have access to multi-million dollar fortunes, Phillip Lim dresses, or media reporters. Can't book publicists and magazine editors give those women some love, too? Though maybe Ruthanna Hopper deserves all the breaks she can get, because when she was a kid, her batshit papa tried to stab Rip Torn, drank thirty beers and did three grams of coke a day, and subsequently has given large sums of money to the Republican party. It's hard out there for a celebutante!

Cinema Verite [WWD]
Jenni Kayne's Big Picture [Los Angeles Times]

Earlier: The Problem With Chick Lit

The book's similarities with Gossip Girl don't end at using the internet as a literary device to move the story forward — according to a review in the UK Independent of the English translation of Girls of Riyadh: "Like their New York sisters, the girls of Riyadh live lives of branded plenitude," writes reviewer Alev Adil. "They watch Hollywood blockbusters, carry miniature pedigree dogs in designer handbags, go to the gym, console themselves with rhinoplasty and chemical peels, drink daddy's secret stash of Dom Perignon and dance the night away in Badgley Mishka or Roberto Cavalli. However, sequestered under Sharia law with little in the way of basic human rights, they must display a great deal more ingenuity than their Western counterparts in order to meet men."

So the acquisition of $3,000 handbags is so important that it's worth circumventing Sharia law. Obviously. It's unclear why disgustingly expensive accoutrements have become such a staple of the chick-lit genre. A book about young, urban women can, in fact, be published without referencing Manolo Blahniks. Guess the notion that women are frivolous label whores transcends cultures!

Saudi Girls Gone Wild [Forbes]
Girls Of Riyadh, By Rajaa Alsanea, Trans. Marilyn Booth: Funny And Chilling: Sex In the Saudi City