Daily Archives: March 5, 2008

I just found this Radar interview between Emily Gould and Sloane Crosley. Crosley is a New York-based book publicist whose first collection of essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, debuts next month. Sloane wins me over with her chick lit remarks reproduced below. Even though my first novel has only been published in my dreams, I still prepare myself mentally for the pink cover marketing blitz that will inevitably be attached to it (in my dreams). It’s hard to be a woman writing women these days without being branded a chick lit author, but Sloane has a healthy perspective on this lazy marketing strategy.

Radar: [Your story] made me think of your book as a sort of useful counterpoint to chick lit—like, “this is how it really is to be a single twentysomething girl in Manhattan; it’s not all madcap hijinx and Cosmos and love triangles” (though sometimes it is those things; rarely Cosmos). But you also must have been aware that you were treading into some heavily trafficked territory when writing about being a bad bridesmaid, etc. Are you wary at all of being lumped in with books on the pink shelf?

Sloane Crosley: It’s such a massive lump at this point. I might have been more worried five or 10 years ago when the concept was first being identified, coined, and marketed. But now it seems like if you just pick up a pen and have breasts (not that anyone I know is actually picking up pens with their breasts, in case that’s confusing), then people are predisposed to think what you produce as chick lit. And if it’s in the first person? Forget it. Since the stereotype has grown so widespread it’s almost pointless to be fearful of it. It’s out there, it sells a lot of perfectly good books to the people that want them, and there’s no getting around it. I know mine’s not the same, so hopefully it’ll be okay. For one thing, it’s the details of what an individual life is really like that can save a book from the Cosmo trap, especially in the essay format. Plus, it’s not like I have a giant martini glass on my cover with, you know, a miniature sparkling stiletto in lieu of an olive.

It’s funny, at Vintage we reissued Lorrie Moore’s Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? with a new cover, a decade after it was first published, and some tiny paper reviewed it as if it had just come out. It was fascinating because they condemned it as trafficking the same territory as the “pink shelf” books. And I thought, this is Lorrie Moore, damn it. How far have we let this thing get that there are to be no more plotlines about female friendships or the opposite sex or coming of age or self-reflection at all? I think the only way to avoid the label of which you speak would be to write a novel in which a woman sits in a room painted black, speaks to no one for 400 pages, and keeps a gun in one hand and a scotch-stained copy of The Executioner’s Song in the other. Even then, she’d probably have to use a pseudonym.