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The lit of chick lit.

Article Excerpt
As the literary butterfly known as chick lit flutters past, let's capture that Lepidoptera, pin it to a board, and see what the frivolous and flamboyant creature is all about. Putting metaphors aside, let's talk about how YA chick lit differs from its adult predecessors and other antecedents, define its patterns, respond to some recent press about it, and question its direction and influence.

First, let us acknowledge that the phrase itself is inherently demeaning, perhaps even sexist. Chick is a derogatory term for the presumably empty-headed girls or young women who are both the characters and the readers; lit is an ironic reference to the assumed lack of quality writing in the form. Whether any, or all, of so-called chick lit deserves this scorn will remain to be seen over time.

The adult prototype, of course, was Helen Fielding's v. British and v. amusing Bridget Jones's Diary. Its success, according to a recent collection of essays (Chick Lit: The New Woman's Fiction, edited by Suzanne Ferriss and Mallory Young) and an article in the New York Times ("The Chick-Lit Pandemic" by Rachel Donadio), has been followed by imitators all over the world. But these stories of newly independent young women trying to cope with office jobs and the demands of urban pop culture are very different from the teen chick lit that was initiated by the YA Bridget Jones spinoff Angus, Thongs and...

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