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WHY I LOVE CHICK LIT
BY LIA ROMEO
I love chick lit. I’m a smart girl – I’ve got my degree in comparative lit from Princeton and I’ve read my Derrida – but I’ll take Jennifer Weiner (also a Princeton alum!) any day. Here’s why:
1. It’s relevant.
I’m a young woman living in and writing about the 21st century. As such, while I absolutely think it’s important to use fiction to experience the lives and concerns of people who are completely different from me, I’m also going to devote a portion of my (all too limited) reading time to reading about people who are in a similar position, and thinking about the ways that their experience of the world might inform my own – and my writing.
2.It’s escapist.
Sometimes we just need to read something fun – and for me, it’s chick lit. In chick lit novels, bad dates aren’t a pointless waste of time, they’re a way for the heroine to realize what she really wants. Jobs aren’t tedious and boring, they’re full of fun anecdotes and entertaining coworkers. And everything usually turns out okay in the end. When I first decided to write a novel, I’d just gone through a bad breakup and moved out of the place I’d shared with my boyfriend, and I was living in a dirty apartment with two strangers, one of whom turned out to (literally) be a psychopath. I needed a way to “get away,” and writing chick lit turned out to be perfect.
3.It’s conventional.
Okay, so this sounds more like it ought to be a criticism … but I find that working within conventions – or reading something that does – can actually 
spark creativity instead of stifling it. I’ve always been fascinated by variations on a theme – it’s why I love the architecture of churches – they’re all created for the same basic purpose, and have certain similarities, but each one also executes that purpose in such a unique way. I feel the same way about books within a particular genre – like chick lit. When they’re badly done, it can feel like they’re just telling the same old tired stories over and over, but when they’re well done, I love seeing the unique spin that different authors put on the same conventions. When I decided to try writing a chick lit novel, the first thing I thought about was how I could take the conventions of the genre and work with them in an original way.
