Why women like chick lit

I have always found the term chick lit somewhat demeaning. (One reader said that a major bookshop chain in the city has classified Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss as chick-lit. Go figure. But they had also classified Gone with the Wind as geography.) Kate Monahan quotes UK chick lit author Jill Mansell in the Waikato Times: "Chick lit is like chocolate. It is lovely."

Jill Mansell has published 19 books and has sold more than three million copies of her books 'full of feisty women going through family dramas and life issues, from unwanted pregnancy to adultery to getting older ... Yet, some critics would call the genre lightweight at best, and romantic mind-rotting claptrap at worst.'

Mansell, not surprisingly, says that snobbery is not fair. 'Chick lit probably doesn't get the respect that more literary books get, but we get paid more.'

Jill Mansell worked in a hospital as an electro-encephalographic technician measuring brain waves when she started writing for Mills & Boon. But they said her stories were too funny. 'Apparently humour in the bedroom was not what Mills & Boon readers wanted.'

Chick lit has spawned a whole lot of sub genres. There is 'lad lit' (also called 'dick lit' for blokes), 'yummy mummy lit' (for 30-something mums), 'hen lit' (for older women in their 40s or 50s), 'teen chick lit', 'vampire chick lit', 'mystical chick lit', 'Indian chick lit' with less sex. 'English chick lit has more of a sense of humour, and US chick lit is more racy. Scandinavian chick lit is darker ...'

So, now you know.

Waikato Times http://www.stuff.co.nz/4493969a4501.html