Bridget jones, meet the new gals of chick lit

Make way, Bridget Jones and Carrie Bradshaw. There’s a bunch of new girls on the block, and their names are Becky, Janey, Andrea, and Amy. All are single, bright, career women – but their lives aren’t perfect. One deals with shopaholism, a couple are terrorized by nightmare bosses, another has to stay sane while planning the wedding of the century. Some have low-paying jobs to rise above, and most have concerned mothers to appease. All are looking for love.

Sound familiar? To more and more female readers, it does. These are the heroines of "Chick Lit," short for Chick Literature, the new brand of women’s fiction that’s been sweeping British, American, and now Philippine, shores.

Go to any bookstore and you’ll notice something’s afoot. On the display shelves are countless titles written for women by women: Marian Keyes’s Sushi for Beginners sits next to Trading Up, the new book from Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell; Laura Wolf’s Diary of a Mad Bride jostles for space with Sheila Norton’s The Trouble with Ally.

Blame the birth of Chick Lit on British author Helen Fielding and the phenomenal success of Bridget Jones’s Diary. Fielding’s account of a smart, thirtysomething "singleton" had young women rushing to bookstores to read about a character, much like them, who counted calories, alcohol units, and dateable men.

In America, like-minded writers such as Melissa Bank and Candace Bushnell followed suit. Bank’s bestseller The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing introduced readers to Jane Rosenal, another flawed heroine with an addiction to self-help books and older men, while Bushnell’s Sex and the City – now one of HBO’s top series – turned Carrie Bradshaw and her cohorts into icons for fashion and the liberated life.

Today, this type of light women’s fiction – usually written in first-person, told in diary form or through letters, e-mails and lists – has been lifted above trendy beach or summer reads. Nor are they merely glorified Harlequin romances. In the US, Barnes & Noble reports that while mega-authors like John Grisham, Tom Clancy and Michael Crichton have had a fall-off in sales, Chick Lit is growing, and growing exponentially.

"There’s this whole single-girl’s life that’s very modern and funny," says Maya Calica, editor-in-chief of Seventeen Magazine Phils. and author of one of the first Filipino Chick-Lit books, The Breakup Diaries. "I feel that Chick Lit’s characters are more real, less perfect than the heroines in romance novels who are all so perfect and pretty and virginal.

"In Chick Lit, the lead character doesn’t always have flawless skin, gets bad hair days, maybe even has cellulite. She doesn’t always get the guy; maybe her boyfriend likes to cheat on her."

Since the characters are so recognizable and endearing, reading Chick Lit is like therapy or sharing secrets with a best friend, say readers. Despite the heroine’s foibles, what’s important is that she faces her crises with self-deprecating humor.

"The fact that it glorifies the lives of single women is very empowering for women who are still single," adds Calica. And with more females staying single in their late 20s and 30s, Chick Lit and shows like Sex and the City may be fun ways of telling them it’s okay to be single and enjoy themselves.

In some cases, Chick Lit is even better than therapy, because you get gossip, according to STAR columnist Celine Lopez. "Women are naturally drawn to it even if it’s about fictional characters. It also transports us into a world that is beyond what we can reach in our prosaic existence."

At the very least, it provides a mental break for Lopez and stressed career women like her trying to relax. "I enjoy reading Chick Lit for the beach or if I’m in the mood for some light reading," says the YStyle creative director.

So popular is the genre that it’s branched out into sub-genres. Now there’s bridal lit (Sophie Kinsella’s Shopaholic Ties the Knot, Laura Wolf’s Diary of a Mad Bride), mommy lit (Allison Pearson’s acclaimed I Don’t Know How She Does It), revenge lit (tell-alls like The Nanny Diaries or The Devil Wears Prada), and lady lit for older women (Sheila Norton’s The Trouble with Ally).

There’s even d**k (rhymes with "chick") lit for guys, which It girls like Lopez are already into. "Rick Marin’s book Cad is a favorite," she admits, citing among her favorites the godfather of d**k lit, Nick Hornby. (In Hornby’s unofficial guide to males, High Fidelity, men might not keep diaries, but they do keep record collections and Top 10 lists.)

Now that the success of Chick Lit has spawned a glut of titles, the question arises, Does quality really matter? Intelligent readers question the raison d’être of fluffier titles like Sophie Kinsella’s "Shopaholic" series, a franchise seemingly built on one catchy term and cotton candy-colored book jackets.

"If you’ve read one Shopaholic book you’ve read them all," say Jasmin and Krissy, two busy young doctors who take their light reading matter seriously. "It’s amusing but not realistic. Our lives aren’t like that."

"Although a lot of these books are fun, they lack depth," observes Lopez. "At the end you want to put down a finished novel and feel something in your perspective change. Too many times, [Chick Lit writers] like Sophie Kinsella or the dopes who did Nanny Diaries and especially Lauren Weisberger [author of The Devil Wears Prada] are just whiny accounts of their misfortunes."

Chick Lit can indeed turn bad when it turns into Neurotica. Meanwhile, the first-person-narration device has become so overused that most of these books could be retitled "Diary of a Mad… (fill in the blank)." What’s next, Diary of a Mad Dermatologist?

Adds Lopez, "It feeds into the wants of the modern woman – someone who is successful, goal-oriented, in touch with her sexuality, but of course, even with all these themes driving on independence, she still needs Mr. Perfect."

Another reason these books seem to be multiplying like rabbits is the six-figure Hollywood movie deal. In the successful wake of Bridget Jones’s Diary and Sex and the City come The Nanny Diaries and The Devil Wears Prada, both of which have already been optioned by big studios. In fact, Diane Johnson’s novel Le Divorce, about the romantic adventures of an American woman living in Paris, has been turned into a movie starring Kate Hudson and should hit theaters soon. Since Johnson has two more novels in the same vein, and since the light tone and predictable arc of most Chick-Lit characters make the genre inherently cinema-ready, once a Chick-Lit book becomes a bestseller, watch out for more romantic comedies starring Kate Hudson.

But even as Chick Lit reaches saturation point in the UK and the USA, its popularity is still peaking in the Philippines, so much so that Summit Media Inc., famous for a magazine empire that includes Preview, Cosmopolitan Philippines and male-oriented mags like FHM, has formed its own imprint, Summit Books, specially dedicated to light reading, i.e., Chick Lit.

"Late last year, our publisher, Lisa Gokongwei-Cheng, decided to publish our own Chick-Lit titles after it boomed big time in both the UK, where it started, and the US," says Tara Sering, Summit Books editor. "Our bookstores were beginning to swell with such foreign titles, proving that there is a Chick-Lit market here. So we decided to come out with our own, closer to the Pinay because the stories are by Pinays, with Pinay protagonists and set in the Philippines."

In 2002, Summit published its first novel, Drama Queen, written by Cosmo associate editor Abi Aquino, about a struggling theater actress whose penchant for drama extends to her career and love life. "It’s hilarious and it sold very, very well considering it’s a new kind of book and it was distributed only in newsstands," says Sering.

Emboldened by the success of Drama Queen, Summit released a second title this year, The Breakup Diaries, penned by the editor-in-chief of its Seventeen magazine, Maya Calica. It’s about (you guessed it) how a nice young woman copes with a bad breakup, and it’s written in the same breezy style as its British and American contemporaries, complete with girlish cartoon cover. Not surprisingly, Calica, who says the character is very loosely based on herself, cites Helen Fielding and Irish writer Marian Keyes as two of her influences.

"I edit a teenage magazine, and get e-mail every day from readers who are broken-hearted," Calica says. "Since breaking up is a universal experience, I decided to touch on that. I wanted to hit two birds with one stone: 1) Write a fun book and 2) Give readers a sense of hope about breakups. I put quizzes in certain chapters so that readers could gauge how they were doing in their stage of breakup misery."

Consequently, The Breakup Diaries is being snapped up by college kids, while both books, according to Sering, are capturing not only their intended market of single young women, but also marrieds aged 20 to over-40, and – believe it or not – men, who e-mail asking for more titles and sequels. Feedback has come from as far as Pinoy readers living in the States, who find our homegrown Chick Lit "locally flavored and so relate-able."

Book number three, Almost Married, is due out in two weeks, "the sequel to the freebie novelette we published with Cosmo’s October 2002 issue called Getting Better," says Sering.

Though Summit eventually intends to expand beyond fiction and light reading, the current hunger for Chick Lit shows no signs of dissipating.

"Chick Lit is constantly evolving," notes Lopez. "Edith Wharton is Chick Lit as much as Helen Fielding is. These are books that feed into our fantasies, as long as we have the desire to fulfill them even vicariously through fictional heroines."

Adds Calica, "For as long as the writing is fresh, funny, and in touch with the Filipina reader’s issues, people will want more Chick Lit."