MUSINGS
Chick lit: For that essential feel good feeling
ANITA NAIR
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You might have lost battles with cellulite, gravity and teenage children but there are compensations.
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IT is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of chick lit is very seldom a chick herself...
However little known the feelings or views of the chicks themselves with regard to how they are depicted, this truth is so true in the minds of the women of a certain age, that all chick lit is considered their rightful property...
Jane Austen says as much or something to that effect. And even if she didn't, my friends of a certain age completely agree ...
There was a time when I cocked a snook at anything that remotely resembled women's writing. This was during my chick days.
Act of drudgery
I was so busy being the superstar of my own life that women's writing seemed a synonym for banal. The very act of opening a book written by women for women seemed an act of drudgery. I would toss my hair, grimace and move on to weighty tomes, hefty with gravitas and much existential angst.
Not anymore. Now on my bedside table where once Camus and Kazantzakis reigned, pretty pink volumes with grab-you-by-the-gut titles in loopy writing reside. However I am not entirely out of the closet yet. At times, I feel as though I have gone back to my early teens when I hid my Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldons amid the more innocuous Mills and Boon. For when I have guests who may wander into my bedroom, I place a Vintage collection of Latin American short stories or a Jeanette Winterson or a Bruce Chatwin on top of the pile...
How do I explain to them the essential feel-good feeling having a volume or two of chick lit by your bedside evokes? That a daily fix works just as well as De-anxit minus the pharmaceutical complications... I can empathise with the heroine of Allison Pearson's `I don't know how she does it' as she stealthily squashes store bought mince pie to make it look home made. I used to go one step further and bake my son a cake religiously every week to compensate for my constant absences. Until the day he told me that he was perhaps the only kid in his class whose mother actually baked a cake herself...
I can see the distinct advantages of being a Maeve Binchy heroine who polishes her silver when troubles come calling and her life falls around her ears... . I think the Buddhists refer to it as going with the flow. I can feel myself cringe as a heroine of one of those countless books makes a career faux paus. Never fraternise with the boss. Youthful playfulness is often seen to be as hitting at someone. Particularly if the someone is high up in the power ladder.
I can feel the relief that she does when away from home in a strange city after a night of `strangers in the night' induced drunken togetherness, she wakes up in her own bed with a chaste unslept side...
But best of all, I can feel all my competitive sap rise and then surprisingly plateau as the heroine (always the heroine) rushes from one zone after the other in a life full of zones. Mother. Wife. Sister. Daughter. Boss. High Net Employee. Domestic goddess. Siren. Bitch... . The frantic pace of being a chick in a chick-lit makes me glad that I am not a chick anymore.
Compensation
You might have lost battles with cellulite, gravity and teenage children. But to compensate there is a certain restfulness that comes from leaning against pillows and sipping your Horlicks even as you read about mousy heroines with bountiful breasts or angel-faced flat-chested ones, million dollar deals, chance encounters and personal velocity that never pauses for a moment.
Anita Nair's books have been translated into over 25 languages.
Visit her at www.anitanair.net
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