From pacey page-turning beach books (hello, Sarah J. Maas’s A Court Of series), to mind-bending memoirs to devour on the plane (I’ve just finished Rebel Wilson’s autobiography on Audible – a total must), for me, summer marks a season of lots and a lots of reading. But as the shelves in Borders and Kinokuniya fill up with your next purchases, the phrase rooted in literary snobbery gets ready to rear its ugly head: chick-lit.
I hate this phrase. It deduces contemporary rom-com novels, dismissing popular women’s fiction – which, let’s be honest, is arguably by far the most popular and the most profitable – as something that’s just a bit…cringe. It carries the implication, perpetuated by men, that, as women, we require a different genre of fiction. Lest we forget there is no male equivalent of this phrase.
Reading has long been a marker of status and intelligence, but only if you’re reading certain types of books. Like, for example, poetry or finance or basically anything by Yuval Noah Harari. So, where does that leave those of us who exclusively read candy-coloured trilogies that we hope are turned into film adaptations starring Zendaya and Sydney Sweeney?
Chick-lit isn’t meant to change the world and win every Man Booker Prize. It’s meant to entertain readers and go rather nicely with a sun lounger and an Aperol Spritz. Some of these novels have even reached such a stratospheric level of pop-culture fame that lines from the novels have seamlessly assimilated into our language – think Bridget Jones, Sex and the City, and pretty much the entire Nancy Meyers canon.
On TikTok (where the romance genre is booming, we hasten to add) the hashtag #chicklit has 13.5 million views, and the search for ‘best romance novel’ has a whopping 55.2 million views. Case in point? Women’s stories matter. So why is chick-lit so often dismissed and derided? Now, I know that the term “women’s commercial fiction” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but the current lexicon we’re using around this genre is pejorative and patronising.
So let’s renounce and reclaim this gender-bashing term. This summer I’ll be reading plenty books that are fun, frivolous, and frothy in their plot, writing style, and character development. I’ll be poolside with a hand-illustrated cover depicting stilettos and a cocktail, and nobody is going to make me feel ashamed of it.