Why I Hate Chick Lit

I'm tired of modern chick lit.

As someone who spends 1.5+ hours a day on trains, I get a lot of reading done. I'll read pretty much anything - fantasy, sci fi, historical fiction, biographies, social science books, you name it. I love when people give me book recommendations and very frequently I select my books by seeing what my friends are reading on Goodreads. Even if I know nothing about them.

Sometimes, yes, I end up being blindsided by chick lit.

Here's the thing about it. Chick lit can be highly entertaining, and those are frequently the books that I can't put down, finishing them in 1 or 2 days because I just NEEDED to let the drama unfold. The problem, though, is that I come away from these books feeling dumber. Because I didn't learn anything, didn't feel inspired by the quality of the writing or the creativity of the ideas, and as realistic as the heroines are supposed to seem, I never get the sense that those women are real people.

Frankly, I'm tired of reading this bullshit. I'm not even super well-versed in chick lit because I make a point of trying to avoid it, but I've accidentally or not-so-accidentally read enough over the years that I can tell chick lit from just the first few pages. Yet, like a deer in headlights, I just can't seem to extricate myself from the oncoming horror.

I'd like to read more books about women who aren't awful. Who are smart, nuanced, independent, and yes, flawed. And I don't mean flawed as in "oh teehee I spilled some coffee on my blouse on the way to work so I just artfully tied a scarf around my neck and totally rocked it because it ended up looking faaaaabulous." I mean actually flawed.

After years of reading books by the likes of Lauren Weisberger (who, in my opinion, went majorly downhill after Prada) and Emily Giffin (who, to be fair, at least gave me the inspiration for the best blog post title I've ever come up with in 11 years of blogging), I'm tired of the formulaic heroine who is supposed to be the opposite of your stereotypical damsel-in-distress but ends up being just another cliche.

Giving a woman a fancy Wall Street job does not make her smart.

Having her put on 10 pounds so she is now a size 4 instead of a size 2 does not mean she has real problems.

Surrounding your main character with some vacuous friends - the goody two shoes, the effortlessly promiscuous one, and the sensible one who is actually the main character's closest friend but the other 2 don't really know about it - doesn't mean she has deep, meaningful personal relationships. It means she's a ripoff of Sex and the City.

I've read a lot of books about women in New York, yet I've never seen myself or my friends reflected in any of them. Not because we're all unique snowflakes, but because we're REAL PEOPLE. We're ambitious women who, despite being smart and motivated, may never see our dreams come to fruition because this is real life and you cannot just MacGyver a wildly successful cupcake bakery out of some flour, some fondant and whatever money you have left over from last week's paycheck. We lose our jobs (raises hand, what up 2012) and we don't have a sassy gay friend to barge into our apartments, produce an amazing outfit out of the Forever21 crap we have in our closets and send us on our way to a job interview he magically set up for us. And when I say we lose our jobs, I don't mean we quit them in a flurried, climactic moment of both high stress and clarity about how much we really want that cupcake bakery.

In real life, not everyone wants a cupcake bakery. Seriously. The presence of the bakery dream in chick lit is as ubiquitous as the bitchy coworker who's always trying to take the main girl down a peg.

And it should probably go without saying that in real life, the perfect man does not materialize just at the very moment that we've gotten our hearts broken by some shithead. We get our hearts broken and we drown our sorrows in vodka and then maybe we spend time with more shitheads and often also the original shithead.

I wish we could go back to the time when chick lit was more Jane Austen and less..this crap. Or maybe I should just do a better job of avoiding it. Hmph.