Can We Have Good Chick Lit, Please?

(I’m Begging)

This was going to be a very different piece. I thought I was going to say that we should not be embarrassed or ashamed of being lowbrow readers, and that highbrow readers should not think themselves superior. I thought I was going to confess that reading lowbrow literature is fun, and that highbrow literature is overrated. I changed my mind. 

A few weeks ago I fell into a reading slump. You can tell it’s bad when you start denying books before bed in favor of screens. I’m making an effort to regulate my online content consumption, and find the discipline to keep my Instagram Reels use to a minimum, because how embarrassing is it to sit with a phone in front of your face in your finite leisure hours of the day? More than that, how damaging is it for your mind? Brainrot, originating in the chronically online community of its victims, refers to the melting of brain cells from hours of watching thirty second videos. The worst part is, even though I know it’s bad for me, I can’t stop. It feels sooooo gooooood. 

I resolved to climb out of the reading slump in the easiest way possible: by picking up a book that I privately label under the genus, Trash Lit. 

Trash Lit is not literature. More often than not, it is a “BookTok” book. It also frequently doubles as Chick Lit. The single best example of Trash Lit that is also Chick Lit is Collen Hoover. 

Full disclosure, I’ve never actually read Collen Hoover, so I can’t make an educated judgement of her work. But from what I understand based on the critique of other people, it is not very good. And while I’m not opposed to reading Hoover in the future, I think it’s worth it to ask: is Trash Lit just another form of brainrot? 

Obviously, it is better to read something shitty than to watch something shitty. No question. Your brain has to work harder to read than to mindlessly inhale short-form audio/visual stimulation. But if you’re reading Trash Lit, how much harder is it actually working? 

When I found myself racking up more than a few hours of screen time, I knew I needed something that would help me make the first jump out of the brain-rotting content consumption hole. I won’t name the book I chose. I got it from the Book Launch Party which I wrote about extensively (and negatively), and in the interest of protecting myself from the liability of inadvertently exposing Big 5 Publisher, I’ll stick to the basics. 

While at the party, reveling in Merchland and all its glory, I was told that a “Take Shelf” had been set up, displaying recently or soon-to-be published copies of books that were up for grabs. When I asked for recommendations, I was told that they were all “rom-coms.” It was very clear what this meant. I took two books, anticipating that they would be useful for something like getting out of a future reading slump. It does happen from time to time.

When it was finally time to make use of the rom-coms, I decided that I would write a piece contributing to the discourse of readers who build community for the fact that they enjoy reading, and their adversaries in the readers who judge others for what they read, and the dichotomy of the two communities being adjoined to highbrow versus lowbrow literature. I so desperately wanted to be an advocate for Trash Lit, and dispel the myth that we have to read soul crushing shit all the time in order to be considered well read. Then I read the book. 

I want to be clear that I don’t stick up my nose at Trash lit, beyond the fact that I call it Trash Lit, and that I can and do enjoy lowbrow literature. But I also find it very painful. 

These books are engaging. The plots are entertaining, they keep you hooked, and this last one did in fact help me start reading instead of scrolling. But as a writer, and as someone who appreciates writing as an art, it was also majorly cringe-inducing. I mean like, read a line and physically shudder level cringe. 

A book with a good plot and good writing doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive. In many cases, it isn’t. It is just extremely unfortunate that so much of modern Chick Lit is Trash Lit. 

Though “good writing” is an objectively subjective notion, there are some features which differentiate Trash Lit and Good Lit beyond the description of ideas, scenes, or narratives. Trash Chick Lit is poorly written, and it is incredibly vacuous. It doesn’t say anything.  

The sickest part is, this wasn’t always the case. 

After reading the Trash Chick Lit Novel, I sought redemption with Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility.

In true Austenian fashion, it centers on themes of love, courtship, and marriage, which is to say it follows traditional Chick Lit themes. But it does so with intelligence. 

Austen was a satirist. She was a social critic. She writes with irony about the social structure of marriage in Georgian era England, in that it was a business and a social transaction. Matchmakers wonder how much a male suitor’s income per annum warrants a bachelorette’s class and repose. Austen’s heroine replies, “The lady, I suppose, has no choice in the affair” (278). Austen critiqued the social system under the guise of Chick Lit, and she does so with writing that has landed her as one of the greats. 

Modern day Chick Lit sinks into relationships in which the relationship is the only subject. Everything else takes a back seat. There’s no critical thinking. And if there is, it is always depressing. 

There is Chick Lit out there that isn’t Trash Lit. Moshfengh, Rooney, and Flynn all write novels clearly targeted towards women. I would argue they are well written. And yet, they are all markedly more depressing than traditional Trash Chick Lit. So the only options we get for Chick Lit are vapid, shallow, smut-filled novels, or depressing tales about troubled female characters? 

I don’t think books necessarily have to have social commentary to be good. A beach read is called a beach read because it is easily consumable, and relaxing enough to read while lounging on the sand. But can’t we at least have something good? Or if not good, then not bad? 

Austen wrote with humor, intelligence, and style. Her work can also be hard to understand. Those classics are challenging to a reader with a 21st Century set of eyes. They’re more dense, they move slower, and use phrases like “pray tell” and “whence.” 

But this is also why I felt so much better about reading Austen. I felt like I was actually exercising my brain; you have to work a little harder to read Austen and understand her. You might have to re-read passages, take a beat in the middle of a chapter to make sure you comprehend, even pull up Sparknotes to double check. But then, can you say that you’re simply reading for fun if you’re actively working your brain? And can you only do one or the other? 

It presents two ends of a spectrum without anything in the middle. It’s either lazy, quick Trash Lit or deep, dense Highbrow Lit. 

And then, we readers of Highbrow Lit fall into the trap of making the literature we read the basis for our personalities, and consequently being uber-pretentious about it. 

I’ve written about the performance of content consumption as a way to signal self-created identity ad nauseam, but in short, it seems that (online especially), people consume art for aesthetic purposes. “Girls who read Plath” or “Girls who read Kafka” or Girls Who Read Highbrow Literature are implicitly deep, and far more intelligent than Girls Who Read Chick Lit. 

Obviously, people find community and identity in their interests, and obviously, I am not immune to it either. Nor do I object. But I find an issue in the identification with Highbrow Lit as a form of conspicuous consumption. 

Conspicuous consumption refers to the idea that a person may consume a good for the sole purpose that other people will watch them consume it. It’s how the iPhone choked out all the other smartphones in the country. Everyone wants that blue text bubble; the green text bubble identifies Android users as “other.” The same idea can be applied to performative reading. People may only consume a certain type of literature because it signals their constructed identity to others. 

Books, and readers of books, take on an identity as part of an intellectual in-group. People who read books like this are like me. I read Highbrow Lit because I am smarter (better) than people who read books like that. It’s the snobbery of academia and the art world itself, and being pretentious about your content consumption in its erudite elitism. 

And there is an undeniable difference in the fan communities of the Highbrow/Lowbrow books, how they speak to each other, about each other, and about other books. For all of the people lauding Hoover’s latest, there are twice as many complaining that such fans are not “real” readers because they are not reading “real” literature. But can you be a real reader if you are only reading because you want to act in the performance of it, rather than in the pleasure of it? 

So here is my request, to the writers of the world. I want good, well-written, non-vacuous Chick Lit. I want a modern day Austen. I want something easy, but not shallow, but not depressing, but not pretentious, and not performative. Does such a thing exist? 

Now officially out of the reading slump, I’m loading Babitz, Lispector, and Nin into my library cart. I can’t deny that performance is fun.