I’ve not written a blog post in quite a while, so thank you to my followers for being patient with me. In the meantime, I hope you have enjoyed my posts about featured authors and books.
I’m proud to say that I am a huge fan of the Chick Lit genre. Without the following authors, I wouldn’t have been inspired to be the Chick Lit Goddess. For this, I say thank you to Olivia Goldsmith, Jane Green, Jennifer Weiner, Meg Cabot, Candace Bushnell, Jane Porter, and of course, Emily Giffin, for inspiring me.
Through my Chick Lit Goddesses Facebook group, I found something that really made me mad, mad being the nice way of saying it. On Monday there was an article on The Atlantic written by Emily Matchar titled “Chick Lit Is Dead, Long Live Farm Lit.” Stemming from the numerous comments on the FB page, I was curious, so I clicked the link and began to read. Without explaining the article word-by-word, I’m going to share the following sentences that really had me livid.
- Well I have news. Yes, chick lit is dead (or dying, at least). But in its place, we now have a new genre. Call it “farm lit.”
- Thanks to the economy, picket fences and scruffy farm hands have replaced stilettos and cute i-bankers in literature aimed at women. (This was the subtitle.)
- So many of chick lit’s tropes—stilettos! Fighting for your big break in journalism! Cute i-bankers! The hottest new nightclub in the Meatpacking District!—were part of a boomtime economy. These days, we’re mostly wearing flats, journalism is breathing its last gasps, we’d rather throw i-bankers in jail than date them, and cupcake baking seems a lot more fun (and cheaper!) than clubbing.
First off, what the hell is “farm lit?” I even Googled it, then laughed to myself when no definition was given. Just because a city girl runs off to a small town doesn’t make it “farm lit.” In my third book, Somewhere Down in Texas, which I’m still writing, it is about a big city girl who goes back home to Texas, but does that make it “farm lit”? No! To me, it doesn’t matter where the setting is. In Kristina Knight’s books, there are strong elements of country girls and I consider them to be Chick Lit.
Has Chick Lit changed overtime? Yes, but that doesn’t mean the genre has disappeared. If anything, I think it’s grown more popular because of modern times. We want someone to relate to us, so what do we do? Pick up a Chick Lit. Have you ever read a Chick Lit and after finishing it, said, “Geez, that’s my life?” I know I have! Think how many Chick Lit books Jennifer Weiner and Emily Giffin have written. How many times have they been at top of the charts? Between the two of them, they’ve written 18 books, and I don’t seem them stopping soon.
After taking a long sigh, I did some research on the author of The Atlantic article. Emily Matchar seems to be very opinionated, black and white writer, who sees no shades of grey. On her website, it said that she went to Harvard. Now, I’m not saying she was in a library the entire time and didn’t have fun, but the way she bashed the Chick Lit genre so bad, it seems that way. By the title of her book, which is coming out soon, Homeward Bound seems like it would be a great fit for women in the 1950’s. There is nothing wrong with, as the quote says on her site, the “new domesticity” – the re-embrace of all kinds of old-fashioned domestic skills, like canning, bread-baking, knitting, chicken-raising, etc.,” but times have changed. Women are in the workforce, so what’s wrong with taking a breath and running to the country for a getaway, or even an extended stay? Nothing!
I want to let Emily Matchar know that Chick Lit is alive and kicking, so “farm lit,” is dead!
I’d love to hear what you have to say, so please leave a comment!