Backdraft For Chick Lit Talk at University

This is the Wordier Draft of the Talk I plan to give at the University on Feb 9th, the Noon Hour Talks at Ban Righ House, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I plan to give out books during and after. Would like to get a debate going between myself and professors from some relevant disciplines. So far it isn’t happening. Planned it for International Women’s Day, March 8th.

In women’s fiction you’ve basically got your two choices; Chicklit or Snotlit. One you read a page at a time and then meditate. It makes you feel all delicate, sensitive, misunderstood and prone to migraines. The other feels like a shot in the arm, like someone pencilled an ‘Okay!’ beside your name. You feel you can tackle, it, make it, win it, do it, putting down the book and rolling up your sleeves. Snotlit is a tremulous little teardrop, Chicklit a friendly boot up the backside. With snotlit you end up feeling a little chilly, as though you might be coming down with something. All the fiction in the world of women divides into these categories and all your friends do too.  I am buying books off the rack at the drugstore again.  Steinbeck was one. Lurid. Mostly for men. Covers told you that. Thrillers demeaned women.
Chic lic is a good measure of elitism, ’snots’ we used to call ‘em, those academic wannabes who read what the NYT list tells them to read, fester in bookclubs and keep themselves safe from the masses. They worship at the altar of V. Wolfe and tend to have difficult marriages, due to being frequently misunderstood by their spouses. Elitism, pretentious snottiness, graciously deigning to the underlings. No wonder women don’t think they like books anymore. Prescribed like drugs. Chic lit makes you say, ‘yeah, I can do it, make it, tackle it, win it.  I’ll be okay.’ Yeats read Westerns. Snotlit is often well-written, there’s no denying, good for dipping into when your style might be slipping but never mistake it for useful, helpful or a good time.
Chick Lit was written for women like me who needed a recipe book on how the world worked. In those prefeminist days, as a teenager, I searched desperately for anything on how to be a woman, stumbling across quite a bit written by men but nothing useful. I went through Dale Carnegie to no avail.
Of course I was encumbered by the church who trotted out stacks of Heroines Of The Bible and how you were to emulate these various saints with a life of self sacrifice and dedication. While it sounded all right on paper, none of these pretty little essays addressed the real world of American Graffiti at all. The church kept me away from what were considered the more seamier movies where I might’ve learned something. I had already renounced drinking, dancing and lipstick, which meant I was unemployable by Woolworths where I might’ve learned a thing or two in the ladies room.
My two sisters were trying out the dating thing with the exact same lack of knowledge and disastrous results. The male species whom they could find to canoodle with were mostly on short-term release from reform school. The summer I was fifteen, my father assigned the three of us to put new shingles on the house. It was a hot summer and there we were in old jeans and the smell of tar in our nostrils, me using the brush and the hammer, while my sisters had sneaked their boyfriends up the ladder and were giggling on the shady side where the cottonwood hung towards the house.
Despite their laughter, they had no clue what this other gender had in mind when it came to getting close. When I complained, my father indignantly ordered the two boys off the roof, fondly hoping this also meant out of our lives. But by then my older sister was pregnant and the other dating guys in the airforce while still in highschool.
What did these guys want? I asked myself as I read Ivanhoe and The Legends of King Arthur. None of the women depicted related to my church-dominated unhappy life in highschool. I decided to forgo the boys my sisters now and then turned up from under one rock or another, and become an old maid, running a library or owning my own bookshop till somewhere in the contents of those spines on the shelves, I found someone who would tell me the truth.
Sex, of course, was a huge part of the question, but none of us, honestly and, I know, I know, unbelievably, had even ever heard the word. We were isolated misfits, children of two Alaskan survivalists, suspicous of the outside world. ‘The less you knew, the better’ was their theme song, a recipe for disaster at the end of the fifties when flower power was breaking through the thin veneer of propriety that had held adolescent lust ostensibly in check.
Anna Maxted would’ve smartened me up in a few sentences. Jane, Sigaloff, even Kathleen O’Reilly’s beginning: “As I was growing up, I found various methods of pleasuring myself, some creative, some adventurous and some not completely sanitary,” would’ve helped me out. Picking randomly from the five buck Chick Lit table at Chapters is a complete education.
Oh sure, in today’s world, pathetic examples like me might seem sparse on the ground but every woman, no matter what her background, can use a bit more grounding on topics like, Understanding your mother; getting along better with her while not making her mistakes. Sharing an apartment: how to establish a lifelong friendship rather than a lease breaking. Finding a career that fits that you might want to do for life. Figuring out how to keep your marriage going after learning how to pick the right guy in the first place. Having weekend fun without falling down drunk or getting arrested. (And what to do when that happens). How to handle failure, lack of success, the promotion of others, bad bosses, backstabbers, unfaithful boyfriends, pregnancy and abortion. What makes you laugh and where this stuff is found. Where you fit in with all the sea of places in the world. What to do on holiday and what to personally avoid.
No matter how old you are, you never forget those first heady days of moving out on your own, or with a roommate. Of course this is the time when all the decisions about the future are going to be made. They are also the time when you have the least experience you’ll ever have for the rest of your life. Chick Lit is there to save the day. Stacks of it.
Women who lost their father’s early, through death or divorce. Unscrupulous roommate. Predatory workforce. How to handle your financial problems. What to buy to enhance your lifestyle and what you don’t need at all. Topics: Move out on your own, sign a lease and lose your job. When mother moves in with boyfriend & no room for you. How to stand up for yourself.
Your mother was a drunk. Your mother was a saint but died before you hit puberty. Your mother belongs to a more genteel age and wants to live there too. Your father left when you were small. Your father is a serial monogamist. Your father is around but never opens his mouth. Your father is having an affair with your best friend. Your father has been in prison a long time.
Or in my case. Your parents are survivalists who never went near society. Your mother is an arsonist. Your mother is godsmacked and chased your older sister around reciting the Jezebel verses from II Kings. Your childhood included a lot of abandoned mine shafts. Nothing concerning what to do about sex or womanhood ever issued  from your mother’s lips. Divorce, to your mother, is a mortal sin, much worse than murder. (but then she thinks arson is okay). Your mother is stuck to her church like a fly on a sticky strip. Your sisters,(the apprentice Jezebel’s) figured the sex thing out weird but then (duh) nobody ever told them anything.
People talk about how the book was ‘meaningful to them,’ how superb, well-written but you notice they never articulate specifically what that meaning meant.  Did it offer contentment, useful insight, understanding? they never say. Remembering author and title seems quite enough.
‘Oh we discussed that in our book club’ is another cue. The writer herself sees her work as appealing to a certain audience of educated, financially secure women, definitely not the hoi polli. She doesn’t intend to offer them anything but the opportunity to stretch themselves in melancholy ways. The opening sentence isn’t intended to grab anybody, the chapter endings not designed as page turners.
Angst, anguish, anger, all the ‘A’ words get a good cardio workout on the short pages aimed at a small group on one literary prize committee or another.
From these heights, the writer plans to climb the rare heights, not stoop to the common wage-earning, highschool graduate  woman who used to like to read back in school and still would if the writer had cared to grab her attention. Why are woman watching more movies and tv? Ever try a series of snotlit instead?