MORE magazine was kind enough to include Diana Lively is Falling Down in its Must Reads for the July/August issue, saying “Never underestimate the power of a good chick lit...”
I got so distracted I couldn’t absorb the rest of the review.
Chick lit? I thought, having an oxymoronic reaction in which I was pleased to be considered young enough to still be in the chica stage, and simultaneously dissed because God forbid they think my book isn’t serious, or might possibly have me lumped in with all the formulaic chick lit that’s been produced to reproduce the wonderful successes of Bridget Jones’ Diary or Le Divorce.
The trouble with labels is everyone gets lumped in together under the same reductive banner until the lowest-common-denominator prevails. To wit, any number of ponderous, pretentious and unreadable tomes that drag the literary fiction label through the sludge. If Melville only knew it, he might be clamoring for MOBY DICK to be regrouped with naval lit even if it means he’s got to rub shoulders with Tom Clancy rather than be buried alive in the torpor of self-indulgent uber-writer types whose names I won’t mention because even boorish writers have feelings I wouldn’t want to hurt.
To tell you the truth, I’d just as soon be lumped with women writers who write readable stories are entertaining and irreverent. Chick lit may not include such important, earth-shattering subjects as those commonly found in male writers’ literature, but we lesser creatures have trouble understanding the weighty meaning of such mysteries as the talking turd in THE CORRECTIONS, the anguish of a bloke whose wife won’t give him a blow-job in RABBIT RUN or the sacred pleasures of the Baseball Hall of Fame in INDEPENDENCE DAY. I guess my point is, I loved each of these books, not because they were literary or male but because I was able to suspend disbelief and enter the writer's fictional dream. Great art entertains, first and foremost. So whether it's chick lit or Dick Lit, I'll read it all day, as long as you don’ t make me take it too seriously.
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