A few weeks ago, in the New York Times Book Review, a writer began her review of my new novel, Class-a satire about race, class, public school, parenting, and liberal hypocrisy-by calling me a "lit chick." It was a phrase I had not seen in print before, but the meaning was clear enough: All you had to do was flip the two words.
Whatever I'd accomplished in my 20-year career and over five books, the reviewer seemed to imply, I was still apparently a writer of "chick lit," that amorphous if much denigrated sub-genre of "women's fiction" that sprang to life in the mid 90s with Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones's Diary and Sophie Kinsella's Diary of a Shopaholic and which tended to concern itself with plucky and sometimes hapless under-40 urban white female heroines in search of love.
