Miss Popularity
A few days after the People shoot, the website "Number One Hit Song" posted an anonymous screed that named Jennifer Weiner "promoting her new book by posing with husband and spawn in People magazine" as the "apotheosis of this anachronistic belief system," one that says "shopping is divine, a career is cool, but the only life goal of any real importance is finding a man to procreate with." The title of the post: "Eight Reasons Chick Lit Authors Should Be Kicked Until They’re Dead."
COINED IN THE ’90s to describe a genre of fiction written for, by and about females, the term "chick lit" connotes the sort of books, as a recent Newsday feature put it, that come "wrapped in pink covers featuring swirly letters and curvy legs ending in stiletto heels." They are the sort of books that inevitably star a heroine who has the kind of problems that women of the Sex and the City generation can empathize with: love, money, career, marriage, babies, a few extra pounds. These are the sort of books that Jennifer Weiner writes. Chick lit is not the sort of lit you hear discussed on C-SPAN’s Book TV, or raved about in the New York Times Book Review, or reviewed anywhere that might be described as "literary," unless you count Great Beach Blanket Reads! features in Cosmopolitan. Most writers whose work falls into this category admit the term is useful from a marketing standpoint, and they certainly can’t deny its popularity with the masses. But some authors who find themselves under the chick-lit umbrella, on the Beach Blanket, are starting to chafe at the nature of their exposure. After all, they have spent months — years — writing books, and they want to be recognized for their effort, not have them written off as "nothing more than the contemporary version of the ‘How to Get Married Novel,’" as writer Erica Jong recently sniffed about the genre.
After all, no writer wants to look dumb, and everyone who went to high school knows you can’t be smart and popular at the same time. This is probably why Hyperion, which publishes Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell, has recently started to bill her work on husband-hunting New York singles as "social satire." Fear of being lumped into the decidedly uncerebral "pink-cover ghetto," as Jennifer Weiner calls it, is also the reason it took Weiner, who was on vacation when the Number One Hit Song post went up, just one day to find, read and digest it, and then post a nearly-600-word rebuttal on her own blog, SnarkSpot, at jenniferweiner.com: "I recognize that there’s plenty of chick lit that turns the wedding/ husband/baby into the brass ring that every woman’s grasping for," she wrote, "but my books don’t really fit that paradigm."
JENNIFER WEINER WROTE Good in Bed, a pink-hued Cinderella story about Cannie, a plus-size journalist going through a torturous breakup, as an antidote to her own bad breakup. "[It was] this thing I did to make me feel much better," she says, slicing vigorously into an empanada at Center City’s Pasión. "We didn’t have the kind of breakup where it’s like, ‘Oh, let’s be friends.‘" She puts down her knife and thinks. It’s a couple of days before the People shoot, stiflingly hot — "unspeakable," Weiner says — and even in the air conditioning, her cheeks are pink from the heat. She’s wearing an oversize white t-shirt on a body she describes as "zaftig" — big boobs, big butt, her curly brown hair held off her face by a scrunchie. "We had the kind of breakup where I was like, ‘Oh, I hope you get leprosy and your limbs fall off, and I see you on a street corner someday, turning the pages of my book with your tongue.’"
Weiner makes it clear that Bruce, the boyfriend in Good in Bed, was not her boyfriend, not exactly: "[Bruce] was like the distilled essence of evil … the concentrated essence of badness. Every boyfriend my friends had that did something bad, every bad thing I could ever make up." The book resonated with readers, who saw the ghosts of dating mistakes past in Bruce, a ponytailed pothead who lives with his parents, and heard themselves in Cannie’s frank voice — Weiner’s voice. Good in Bed became a runaway hit among women who refer to their ex’s new girlfriend as "Bitchface," guilty tabloid-readers who know they would dork out when meeting a movie star, as Cannie does in the book and Weiner did in real life, when In Her Shoes was shooting here last year.
"When I met Cameron Diaz, I could not, like, you know, form an intelligent sentence," Weiner says. "She gave me a hug, and I had read in one of the tabloids, in their, you know, annual roundup of ‘Stars Who Stink,’ that she doesn’t shower, so, like, I’m hugging her and sort of sniffing her surreptitiously, but she smelled really good. So I call Adam and I’m like, ‘I met her! And she’s really nice! And she gave me a hug! And she smells great!’ And he’s like: Okay, please tell me that you did not sniff Cameron Diaz. And I’m like, ‘I kinda did. But it was discreet!’"
