On Chick Lit

In a recent post, I asked for book recommendations; a lot of people mentioned Sophie Kinsella, so I searched for her books when I went to the library. However, even though I had heard that her non-Shopaholic books were better, the only one available was Confessions of a Shopaholic, so I snapped that up for a quick read during my lunch break.

The book reminded me strongly of Bridget Jones' Diary, and the ending, wherein silly Becky Bloomwood falls for the serious, intelligent, somewhat condescending Luke Brandon, recalled an even stranger flavor: faint Twilight undertones. It's a classic chick-lit formula, after all: a silly-but-likeable girl blunders her way through life, finds herself attracted to a snotty, superior Byronic fellow, and accidentally does something splendid at the end of the novel that helps to fix everything.

Chick lit is fun because it's fluff and you can read it on the subway without needing to think too deeply, but popular literature is also interesting because of what it tells you about popular culture. After all, if these books are popular, then something in them appeals deeply to many, many people, and that can tell you something about your fellow readers. So what can books like Shopaholic tell us about women?

Well, for one thing, they're certainly incredibly insecure. Both Becky Bloomwood and Bridget Jones are hopeless at their jobs at the outset of their respective books, and they're miserably single (ever notice how these girls in chick lit books are never happily playing the field?), and they frequently feel like they're failures at everything. Doesn't that say anything about the way women in their twenties and thirties are feeling about themselves?

But in a certain way, you can also see these books as a somewhat nebulous expression of feminism. I mean, the women in these books may be similar to one another, but they aren't always similar to your average female stereotype. They like clothes and shoes and they long for a dark, handsome man to come along and sweep them up— but they're also independent women, who possess their own incomes, enjoy sex on their own terms, and hold careers in male-dominated worlds (Becky is a financial writer; Bridget works in publishing, then later as a TV news reporter).

Really, though, isn't that the point— that in the end, our heroines get to have it all? Maybe that's what makes these books escapist experiences for some— because they take the anxieties that lots of women have everyday (Where is my career going? Will I ever fall in love? Am I attractive? How can I balance career success with personal success?) and present scenarios in which women really can have everything at once. At the end of Shopaholic, Becky can have the clothes she loves, a job she enjoys (a job that also pays her oodles of money), a handsome man to sleep with, and plenty of great friends. In the end, Becky never has to choose between kids and a career, between home and the office, between intelligent and beautiful.

What's your favorite chick-lit/chick-flick/fun piece of fluff?