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Chick lit and chick flicks: secret power or flat formula?

Article Excerpt
As I write this in August, girl books and girl movies are as hot as the summer days--if not quite so steamy. No doubt about it, publishers and filmmakers have identified a profitable audience for confessional-style stories among girls both growing and grown-up, and they're getting their products out before this trend, too, shall pass. A recent New Yorker cartoon conveys the literati's snubbing of these works en masse--"Go bother your mother. She's only reading chick lit"--while the cartoon's very appearance means the trend can't be dismissed altogether.

Visits to my two local chain bookstores confirm the prominence of chick lit in the marketplace. In the two featured displays in the Barnes & Noble teen section, the words confession and diary proliferate along with the candy-colored paperback covers. Series books dominate--Gossip Girl, the A-list, Jacqueline Wilson's Girls quartet, the fifth of the endless Confessions of Georgia Nicolson. A few individual trade books compete for the audience, with similarly provocative titles such as The True Meaning of Cleavage, Confessions of a Not It Girl, and The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. Most of these rise above the popular series in quality by addressing real-life problems and developing characters, but, with the probable exception of Ann Brashares's Traveling Pants books, they don't sell as well.

A large summer reading rack at Borders is likewise filled with bright pink, green, and orange, and here the books for adult and teen readers sit side by side, further blurring the sometimes fuzzy lines between them. The Princess Diaries joins all the series mentioned above along with a slew of adult titles in the same niche: Bridget Jones's Diary, The Nanny Diaries, Trading Up by Candace Bushnell (author of Sex and the City), The Botox Diaries, The Dirty Girls Social Club.

Teen queens rule at the movies, too. This year saw the theater release of several films aimed at middle and high school girls, including the sugary modern fairy tale A Cinderella Story and the biting comedy Mean Girls (from SNL writer-performer Tina Fey). A display in Borders's film section proclaims "Girls Rock This Summer" to advertise the DVD release of Ella Enchanted, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, and a "Special Edition" of The Princess Diaries (timed for the theater release of Princess Diaries 2)--all books gone Hollywood. There is simply no equivalent phenomenon, or amount of product, for teen and pre-teen boys. What accounts for the current onslaught of girl-ness?

The Chicks

Chick lit seems to be trickling down from its highly popular adult counterpart. The tremendous success of books such as Bridget Jones and Nanny Diaries, which lured teen readers as well as adults, has YA editors swimming in similar properties. Houghton Mifflin editor Eden Edwards tells me that one such manuscript by a pair of twenty-six-year-old, previously unknown writers brought movie interest from seven film companies based solely on the proposed title, "Confessions of...

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