On Chick-Lit

As Zen In Darkness*, who sent the link below to me, wrote in his email, chick-lit "is genre too, after all".

Joanna Trollope defends chick-lit, and in fact, calls it wit lit: Why I Love Chick-Lit. An excerpt:

"I've been reading a lot of what the media calls chick-lit lately (I've got another name for it - tell you later - bear with me ... ) This is because I'm a judge for a newish prize which I've every faith is going to become a New Big Thing - not least because it's for the books we actually read because we want to, as opposed to the books we buy because ... well, I needn't finish that sentence.

It's called the Melissa Nathan prize and it's for what she called comedy romance. That's what she wrote - remember The Nanny and The Waitress? - before she died two years ago, at only 37, leaving a husband and a little boy and the idea/wish for this prize. Last year was its first year, and the judges - Jo Brand, Sophie Kinsella, Jessica Hines, Gaynor Allen (chief fiction buyer for Tesco) Alan Davies and I, had such a good time that we insisted on being allowed to do it all over again this year.

It hasn't just been fun, it's been a revelation. The thing is, it's hard to write good romantic fiction, and it's much, much harder to write funny good romantic fiction. One of the criteria we judges were given was that if we hadn't laughed, or been really beguiled by the end of chapter one, we should hurl the book away from us (and yes, a lot of books deserve hurling, but that's the fault of their quality and not their genre).

What Melissa wanted was to introduce a little merriment and teasing into the world of literary prizes, where pretension and literary snobbery often find fertile ground. This seems to me a sensible aim for the English, who have a particular and ever present sense of humour, and a propensity for embarrassment when things get emotionally heavy, despite being as emotional as the next nationality."

PGS is open to these kinds of stories. Maybe a special chick-lit issue? Heh. Maybe. But not in the near future. Got to get the Halloween issue and the Crime/Mystery/Suspense issue out first.

*Chiles Samaniego, author of The Saint Of Elsewhere from PGS2