Bookplanet: now that chick lit authors have babies, they're writing "yummy mummy" lit

Chick Lit, the Sequel: Yummy Mummy
BUMPER CROP Many mom-lit authors started as single women writing chick lit. Now, as one editor explained, they have become mothers and they and their plots are "aging up."
By LIZZIE SKURNICK/NY Times

EARLIER this year, an icon of youthful abandon — bubbly, blond, a perpetual adolescent — left the grove of girlhood and gave birth to a baby boy. No, not Britney Spears. The puckish heroine Bridget Jones, whose fictional diary of the urban dating life was a best seller a decade ago, and whose recent journey to the delivery room has been serialized in The Independent in Britain.

Now that even an avatar of youth has reached this milestone of adulthood, it raises the question whether chick lit, the genre that Bridget’s creator, Helen Fielding, all but invented, will finally grow up.

The answer appears to be yes. In 2006, new books by a host of writers associated with chick lit — Laura Zigman, Jane Green, Emily Giffin and Sue Margolis, among others — featured heroines with babies, former 20-something singles who had settled down with Mr. Right and swapped their stilettos for Bugaboo strollers. Similar tales are scheduled to appear in 2007, including “Shopaholic and Baby” by Sophie Kinsella, “Momzillas” by Jill Kargman and “The Infidelity Pact” by Carrie Karasyov.

Although many female authors aren’t happy about it, the term “mom lit” is used in book reviews and on blogs to describe fiction in which the experience of motherhood, perceived with something of the same rueful spirit with which Bridget and her sisters regarded men, is the central drama.

Stacy Creamer, the editor of the “The Devil Wears Prada,” a chick-lit milestone, and of the forthcoming “Momzillas,” said that, based on submissions she receives, there’s “a huge rise in the amount of books by stay-at-home moms writing fiction and nonfiction about that experience.”

Women have always written about motherhood, of course. Toni Morrison ’s “Beloved,” Sue Miller’s “The Good Mother” and Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” are a few classic examples. But many of the books described as mom lit seem indebted to the themes and tone of chick lit.

They are written in the wry voices of a generation of women who came of age after feminism, and they have a newly competitive, higher-end set of woes: $10,000 pacifier consultants, nanny-swiping and Harvard -like nursery school applications. Also present is chick-lit’s familiar cast of characters: the single best friend, the dutiful boyfriend (now husband) and a seductive other man who threatens to upset the apple cart.

Why the sudden interest in what happens after happily ever after? One reason is that authors are becoming mothers themselves. “The writers who used to do chick lit are aging up,” Ms. Creamer said.

And society’s view of the maternal years is changing. From the television soap “Desperate Housewives,” in which managing play dates and sewing costumes for the school play take a back seat to engaging in steamy affairs, to Us Weekly’s obsessive investigations into celebrities’ “baby bumps,” motherhood is suddenly sexy.

And if anything defined chick lit, it was sex appeal. Mom lit’s prevailing aesthetic is Carrie Bradshaw, with a carriage. The cover of “Momzillas” will feature a wind-swept beauty in peep-toe spikes and a polka-dot dress, pushing a stroller with a diaper bag slung over her bare shoulder.

Ms. Kargman, the book’s author, whose previous popular fiction includes “The Right Address” (written with Carrie Karasyov), said that she is writing in the “era of the yummy mummy.”

“They don’t feel like crusty over-the-hill J. C. Penney moms with the tapestry vest,” she said of her readers — and, presumably, her characters.

Chick lit, a publishing genre whose runaway success spawned sub-genres like Christian chick lit and teen chick lit, is now seen to have run its course in the marketplace. Laura Zigman, who once worked in publishing, and who wrote the dating-and-mating sendup “Animal Husbandry,” said, “I think publishers are so hungry for a trend, once it became clear there is, the publisher tries to seize on that and make a niche — then people write into that niche.”

Two best sellers from 2002 may presage success for the new mom lit: “The Nanny Diaries,” which lampoons the rarefied world of Upper East Side parenting, and “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” about a well-off working mom’s attempts to balance bake sales and hedge funds, are considered to have nudged chick lit into the nursery.

If anything, mom lit may be late to the party. There has been a proliferation of nonfiction books in recent years about the contradictions and challenges of contemporary motherhood, including “Perfect Madness” by Judith Warner and “The Mommy Myth” by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels. So-called momoirs, first-person accounts exploding some of the sentimentality about motherhood, include Andrea J. Buchanan’s “Mother Shock” and Muffy Mead-Ferro’s “Confessions of a Slacker Mom.” The Internet also teems with mommy blogs in which women chronicle the daily (or even hourly) tribulations of motherhood; Heather B. Armstrong’s blog, dooce.com , one of the most popular, receives a million unique visitors a month.

The term chick lit made many writers, and some readers, angry. Female authors became concerned that books that critics acknowledged as more literary weren’t differentiated from funny, lighthearted romps about shoes, weight and being stood up by men. Now some express a similar concern about mom lit enfolding anything mother-related in the bookstore. If “The Good Mother” had been written now, “it might be lumped into mommy lit,” said Cathi Hanauer, the editor of “The Bitch in the House,” and more recently the author of the novel “Sweet Ruin,” in which a mother’s depression over an infant’s death lifts when she meets a handsome neighbor.

If authors of mom lit are united in anything, it’s a universal dislike for the term. Some authors say it is sexist, preventing writers from being taken seriously by lumping them together.

Jennifer Weiner, the best-selling author of “In Her Shoes,” resents that women writing domestic dramas are categorized in ways that male writers aren’t. “My feeling about my own work is, I could be writing ‘The Aeneid’ and they would still have to call it chick lit or mommy lit or menopausal old hag lit.” She paused. “Crone lit — is that what’s coming next?”

Some authors worry that the term mom lit, like chick lit or chick flicks, is used to refer not just to the sex of the author or the book’s subject matter, but to the intended audience. This, they say, could be a turn-off to prospective readers who aren’t moms. Ms. Zigman, whose novel “Piece of Work” has been called mom lit in several reviews, says, “When there’s a baby’s butt on the cover, you expect that.”

Still, she thinks the term devalues her work. “It’s a little defeating to be thrown into a pot of mommy lit as if nobody except women my age or my grouping would be interested,” she said.

But many in the publishing industry find mom lit a convenient term. When it comes to talking to bookstore marketers and the book-buying public, “You’ve got a very short amount of time to express what the book is,” said Ms. Creamer, the editor. “If there’s any kind of shorthand that can help sell it and help define it, both the people selling and pitching it will be grateful for those categorizations. But it’s a shame when those categorizations become a little bit of a prison, too.”

Once they get mom lit’s pink-cover treatment — which even some of the more literary books about motherhood do — authors say that they kiss the chance of a serious critical reception goodbye. And some of them voice a frustration over the ability of male authors to avoid being pigeonholed. “Jonathan Franzen wrote a beautiful novel about family, a domestic drama,” said Ayelet Waldman, the author of “Love and Other Pursuits,” referring to “The Corrections.” “Nobody called that dad lit.”

“Little Children,” a novel whose themes are touchstones of mom lit — adultery, competitive parenting — was praised in reviews as a great suburban novel. Its author, Tom Perrotta, has been compared to Chekhov in reviews. “If Tom Perrotta had been Tina,” Ms. Weiner asked, “would they have put a pink cover on that book?”

Ms. Hanauer reluctantly acknowledged that mom lit’s built-in audience can be a plus. “As much as I cringe at a label like mommy lit, if that’s going to get people to pick it up, it’s fine,” she said.

It’s still unknown whether mom lit will be as popular as chick lit. Will women —who buy most fiction — relate to books that, on the one hand, hit all too close to home in their chronicling of the travails of motherhood and, on the other, can be infuriatingly focused on shopping and possessions?

Mommy bloggers are some of the category’s biggest detractors. They bemoan the books’ collective fantasy of motherhood, their concentration on the woes of young, well-off mothers.

“Why aren’t mom-lit books about the frumpy Pentecostal supermarket checker in Omaha with the truck-driving husband?” asks a post on citymama .com. “Or the Methodist sheriff’s deputy in Cheyenne with a schoolteacher husband and five kids all living in a trailer? Or the pagan midwife in Seattle with the lesbian natural foods chef partner and their blended family with kids from previous marriages?”

Ms. Armstrong of dooce.com isn’t impressed with the literary quality of mom lit. “A lot of it reads like someone sat around in a marketing meeting and said, ‘What can we sell to this generation of mothers?’ ” she said in an interview. She, like other bloggers, contends that the real exploration of contemporary American motherhood is being done by mommy blogs — not mom lit. Ms. Armstrong is editing a collection of essays about motherhood, and Alice Bradley, who blogs at finslippy.typepad.com , has signed with an agent.

But plenty of mom-lit authors are unapologetic. They admit that they are writing for a stressed-out army of diaper changers who may not have the time or inclination to read the Great American Novel, at least until the kids are potty-trained. Ms. Waldman, the author of a series of mystery novels, said her books are “meant to be read with all the attention you can muster while breast-feeding.”