Birds and their books

Yesterday, at work, an email came round. Subject: Free Stuff. It was books! How exciting. A table diagonally across the office to me heaved with hardbacks and paperbacks, some still with their A4 press release half-heartedly slipped inside. A crowd flocked round and many came away with wobbly stacks of books. I went to make coffee and diverted to the book table for a peek. A sea of pink and mauve; faceless women and sick-making titles plastered over the covers. How were they even able to choose between titles like She Woke Up And Was Married and Reality Check? I was shocked to discover that what my colleagues were stock piling was (hate this phrase) chick-lit.

Firstly, let me address the reasons I hate the phrase chick-lit. In itself, it means literature for women. But at the same time, it doesn't. Chick? Am I a chick? Dear god, no. I might be crowbarred into feeling like one at a hen night, I might be matily called one by a distant female acquaintance but please, no, I'm not a chick. Women as birds is a dangerous concept. It transports me back to an A Level play, The Cagebirds by David Campton, in which women are literally represented as caged birds. Do we peck at our 'lit', dipping in and out of it on a beach or a packed train as we make mental lists entitled Calories Consumed and Shoes To Buy? Some might, many don't. Do we alight, magpie-like upon silver embossed letters on a baby pink background? Again, seemingly, plenty of us do. I fly off - I mean, walk away, in revulsion.

What of the lit part? Must literature be abbreviated in order that women may buy it? Must novels be categorised into a single genre to make book buying the work of seconds rather than blurb-reading Borders-browsing entire lunch hours or indeed afternoons? Maybe chick-lit's the equivalent of Delia's fast food, Aunt Bessie's instant mashed potatoes. The thing is that most of the women I know shy away from these moronic covers. But you don't need me to tell you that the marketing men (or women) wouldn't keep churning them out if they didn't sell.

I came upon this article today which discusses the covers of such books. Amanda Marcott references this piece by Karen Heller and what's interesting is the fact that many of the authors whose work gets put behind these glossy nothing-y covers are being caged into the chick-lit genre - they are writing superb literature for women, not bird food tales of high heels and orgasms. Even my wonderful Jane Austen’s been, er, pigeon-holed. She would be livid.



The disembodied women part is fascinating too. I hadn’t noticed it until I read these aforementioned musings this morning and now I can think of countless covers in which we see women’s feet, women’s toes, women’s legs, backs of slender necks and faceless figures. It’s sinister stuff. Yes it means you can easily (easily’s admittedly irksome) put yourself in the place of the narrator or main character but really, can the publishers and designers not leave that to the authors and their narrative modes? In my opinion this strategic cropping of women is fetishisation of women, for women. Publishers believe that in our increasingly fragmented and individually portioned lives women will only identify with other women if they are represented as an essentially inanimate object - an ankle, a pair of shoes and a shopping bag, a hairstyle and a slender neck. Whole packages and faces come warts and all but slender ankles wearing pretty shoes are easily overvalued and transformed into women who have everything and can be anything.

I read Becoming Jane and became so inspired as to feel one day I would like to write a book; I am, though, petrified it would be chick-littered. I am confident I wouldn’t complete a novel I felt would be deserving of one of those cropped fetishised women but what if it trod a fine line? And I can’t help but feel there’s a connection to blogging. Here, do I call myself a Girl because it sounds glam and aspirational? I wrote about weight loss issues and used a pretty picture of a cake. Was that my version of the strawberry shortcake? What do you think?