Contents
Title Page
Introduction Why Chick Lit Matters ELIZABETH MERRICK
The Thing Around Your Neck Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Two Days Aimee Bender
An Open Letter to Doctor X Francine Prose
Gabe Holiday Reinhorn
Documents of Passion Love Carolyn Ferrell
Volunteers Are Shining Stars Curtis Sittenfeld
Selling the General Jennifer Egan
The Seventy-two-Ounce Steak Challenge Dika Lam
Love Machine Samantha Hunt
Ava Bean Jennifer S. Davis
Embrace Roxana Robinson
The Epiphany Branch Mary Gordon
Joan, Jeanne, La Pucelle, Maid of Orléans Judy Budnitz
Gabriella, My Heart Cristina Henríquez
The Red Coat Caitlin Macy
The Matthew Effect Binnie Kirshenbaum
The Recipe Lynne Tillman
Meaning of Ends Martha Witt
Contributors
Copyright Information For Individual Stories
Acknowledgments
About The Editor
Copyright Page
Why Chick Lit Matters
I don’t love literary labels, nor do I usually find them helpful. But since you have just picked up a book called This Is Not Chick Lit, I will start with a definition (though if you’ve been in a bookstore in the past five years, you probably don’t need one). Quite simply: Chick lit is a genre, like the thriller, the sci-fi novel, or the fantasy epic. Its form and content are, more or less, formulaic: white girl in the big city searches for Prince Charming, all the while shopping, alternately cheating on or adhering to her diet, dodging her boss, and enjoying the occasional teary-eyed lunch with her token Sassy Gay Friend. Chick lit is the daughter of the romance novel and the stepsister to the fashion magazine. Details about race and class are almost always absent except, of course, for the protagonist’s relentless pursuit of Money, a Makeover, and Mr. Right.
Chick lit essentially began in 1996 with the iconic Bridget Jones’s Diary, a novel culled from Helen Fielding’s newspaper columns. It’s no surprise that many chick lit authors are former fashion or entertainment journalists—the genre’s interest in glamour and goods is perfectly suited to consumer-based media. Sure, Bridget was frothy, and, no, I wasn’t interested in reading her daily calorie count, but back in 1996 I was happy to see any story about a young woman negotiating her place in the world get so much attention. Here was a novel about the nooks and crannies of a woman’s professional and personal life, twenty-five years into feminism’s transformation of the Western world, a novel that investigated what was then surprisingly fresh, uncharted territory. With its accessible, bubbly style, it’s no surprise that Bridget Jones’s Diary was a runaway bestseller.
Yet after Bridget Jones, and the well-crafted and successful Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner, a deluge began, and the consumerist aspect of chick lit swung into high gear, with blockbusters such as The Devil Wears Prada, Confessions of a Shopaholic, and Jemima J. Soon after the millennium, it became nearly impossible to enter a bookstore without tripping over a pile of pink books covered with truncated legs, shoes, or handbags. The genre had exploded.
So, what’s the big deal? What’s wrong with a little fluffy reading? As Choire Sicha wrote in his New York Times review of Plum Sykes’s Bergdorf Blondes, “Look: we all have our own taste in beach trash.” (He also wrote—lest you assume I am the only one with a complaint—that Sykes’s ode to a clichéd vision of aristocratic social-X-rays-in-training “should inspire readers everywhere to rise up and rip one another limbless.”)
And Sicha is right. We all need occasional cotton-candy entertainment to transport us from our increasingly overworked and overstimulated lives. I will happily admit to my own sporadic pleasure in celebrity rags like Us Weekly when I want to pass the time on the treadmill: give me the actual red carpet and stylist-controlled wardrobe over the fawning imitator any day. The problem isn’t that this descendant of the Harlequin romance is a commercial hit. In fact, I believe it’s essential to celebrate the success of women writers of any genre. And I certainly do not want to attack the whole of genre fiction (some of my favorite books are detective novels and superhero comics). The problem is, rather, that the chick lit deluge has helped to obscure the literary fiction being written by some of our country’s most gifted women—many of whom you’ve never even heard of.
I’m going to let you in on a big secret: women writers of literary fiction are having a golden moment, right now. For every stock protagonist with an Hermès Birkin bag and a bead on an investment banker, there is a woman writer pushing the envelope of serious fiction with depth and humor. It’s sad to say, but some of the most dazzling novels and story collections enter the world with little more than the blink of an eye. Readers who want thought-provoking, imaginative books often simply don’t have them at their fingertips—an unfortunate irony, because the writers of these works of fiction want to find their audience as much as readers want to find the books. For this reason it gives me great pleasure to bring you This Is Not Chick Lit: Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers.
Chick lit’s formula numbs our senses. Literature, by contrast, grants us access to countless new cultures, places, and inner lives. Where chick lit reduces the complexity of the human experience, literature increases our awareness of other perspectives and paths. Literature employs carefully crafted language to expand our reality, instead of beating us over the head with clichés that promote a narrow worldview. Chick lit shuts down our consciousness. Literature expands our imaginations.
The artist’s job is to expose us to what is hidden, what is “imperfect,” what popular culture might not be ready to hear. The stories collected here reveal the power of a kind of storytelling that doesn’t always make it to the front of the bookstore. In “Joan, Jeanne, La Pucelle, Maid of Orléans,” Judy Budnitz engages no smaller a story than that of Joan of Arc as seen by a reality television crew. Jennifer Egan imagines one woman’s dilemma on the world stage as a newly hired PR guru for a South American dictator. In Carolyn Ferrell’s “Documents of Passion Love,” we gain access to the world of a photograph from 1914 portraying the first African American couple married in a tiny county courthouse in North Carolina; Ferrell’s potent examination of history and race shows us that sometimes the desire for romantic love takes a backseat to survival. Likewise, Jennifer Davis reveals how race and class do impact on her characters’ lives in the New Orleans of “Ava Bean.” In Mary Gordon’s “The Epiphany Branch,” the pleasure of reading in a local library provides sustenance to a woman who is by no means an intellectual. We are confronted with the threat of nuclear detonation in Samantha Hunt’s “Love Machine,” which also features a girl robot and a lonely guy named Ted who bears more than a passing resemblance to the Unabomber. Even further expanding the range of stories collected here, Francine Prose and Cristina Henríquez choose to narrate in a man’s voice, demonstrating the concept of “getting the guy” in an entirely different manner.
Of course, many of the writers turn their gaze to love in its varied forms—turf certainly covered in chick lit, but addressed more expansively here. In Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Volunteers Are Shining Stars,” single twenty-something Frances pines for a nonexistent boyfriend but finds connection and engagement spending time with the children at a battered-women’s center. We see how the loneliness she sometimes wrestles with, sometimes denies, sometimes reflexively fantasizes a perfect guy will alleviate, is also a state she desires, one in which the possibility exists “to sit on your couch and balance your checkbook and not hear another person breathing.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie investigates the nexus of fa
mily, culture, and change surrounding a young Nigerian narrator and the wealthy white student she begins dating after uprooting herself and moving to New England. Aimee Bender shows us the hope of a first date in “Two Days,” where the protagonist’s concerns as to whether her date is THE ONE fade as her curiosity leads her to focus on the beauty of the world around her. In Holiday Reinhorn’s “Gabe,” our narrator isn’t panicked about finding Prince Charming either—she’s got a husband. The man she’s worried about is her husband’s lost cousin, who falls in love with all the wrong women—how will he ever survive his loneliness? In Roxana Robinson’s “Embrace,” we see the compromises two people make over the span of a lifetime and the range of their experience: passion, dissatisfaction, contentment, and, ultimately, the shock of a previously unimaginable destiny. Binnie Kirshenbaum and Caitlin Macy pull back the curtain on domestic bliss to reveal the disarming malaise that can creep into a comfortable life. Martha Witt and Lynne Tillman examine the limits of language and connection. And if you’ve never considered a western Canadian meat-eating contest as an effective spiritual tonic, then sidle on up to a new take on the pain of divorce in Dika Lam’s “The Seventy-two-Ounce Steak Challenge.”
Chick lit as a genre presents one very narrow representation of women’s lives, a vision that is “the literary equivalent of a tract-house development,” as novelist Whitney Otto recently wrote in The New York Times. I hope you’ll turn the page and explore, with delight and curiosity, stories that are not chick lit—stories that investigate what else is valuable, what else is beautiful, what else is scary, what else holds power, what else can capture our hearts, our imaginations, and our minds.
—Elizabeth Merrick
May 2006
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
You thought everybody in America had a car and a gun, your uncles and aunts thought so, too. Right after you won the American visa lottery, your uncles and aunts and cousins told you, “In a month, you will have a big car. Soon, a big house. But don’t buy a gun like those Americans.”
They trooped into the shantytown house in Lagos, standing beside the nail-studded zinc walls because chairs did not go round, to say good-bye in loud voices and tell you with lowered voices what they wanted you to send them. In comparison to the big car and house (and possibly gun), the things they wanted were minor—handbags and shoes and perfumes and clothes. You said okay, no problem.
Your uncle in America said you could live with him until you got on your feet. He picked you up at the airport and bought you a big hot dog with yellow mustard that nauseated you. Introduction to America, he said with a laugh. He lived in a small white town in Maine, in a thirty-year-old house by a lake. He told you that the company he worked for had offered him a few thousand more plus stocks because they were desperately trying to look diverse. They included him in every brochure, even those that had nothing to do with engineering. He laughed and said the job was good, was worth living in an all-white town even though his wife had to drive an hour to find a hair salon that did black hair. The trick was to understand America, to know that America was give-and-take. You gave up a lot but you gained a lot too.
He showed you how to apply for a cashier job in the gas station on Main Street and he enrolled you in a community college, where the girls gawked at your hair. Does it stand up or fall down when you take the braids out? All of it stands up? How? Why? Do you use a comb?
You smiled tightly when they asked those questions. Your uncle told you to expect it—a mixture of ignorance and arrogance, he called it. Then he told you how the neighbors said, a few months after he moved into his house, that the squirrels had started to disappear. They had heard Africans ate all kinds of wild animals.
You laughed with your uncle and you felt at home in his house, his wife called you nwanne, sister, and his two school-age children called you Aunty. They spoke Igbo and ate garri for lunch and it was like home. Until your uncle came into the cramped basement where you slept with old boxes and trunks and books and pulled your breasts, as though he were plucking mangoes from a tree, moaning. He wasn’t really your uncle; he was actually a distant cousin of your aunt’s husband, not related by blood.
As you packed your bags that night, he sat on your bed—it was his house after all—and smiled and said you had nowhere to go. If you let him, he would do many things for you. Smart women did it all the time. How did you think those women back home in Lagos with well-paying jobs made it? Even women in New York City?
You locked yourself in the bathroom, and the next morning, you left, walking the long windy road, smelling the baby fish in the lake. You saw him drive past—he had always dropped you off at Main Street—and he didn’t honk. You wondered what he would tell his wife, why you had left. And you remembered what he said, that America was give-and-take.
You ended up in Connecticut, in another little town, because it was the last stop of the Bonanza bus you got on; Bonanza was the cheapest bus. You walked into the restaurant nearby and said you would work for two dollars less than the other waitresses. The owner, Juan, had inky black hair and smiled to show a bright yellowish tooth. He said he had never had a Nigerian employee but all immigrants worked hard. He knew, he’d been there. He’d pay you a dollar less, but under the table; he didn’t like all the taxes they were making him pay.
You could not afford to go to school, because now you paid rent for the tiny room with the stained carpet. Besides, the small Connecticut town didn’t have a community college and a credit at the state university cost too much. So you went to the public library, you looked up course syllabi on school websites and read some of the books. Sometimes you sat on the lumpy mattress of your twin bed and thought about home, your parents, your uncles and aunts, your cousins, your friends. The people who never broke a profit from the mangoes and akara they hawked, whose houses—zinc sheets precariously held by nails—fell apart in the rainy season. The people who came out to say good-bye, to rejoice because you won the American visa lottery, to confess their envy. The people who sent their children to the secondary school where teachers gave an A when someone slipped them brown envelopes.
You had never needed to pay for an A, never slipped a brown envelope to a teacher in secondary school. Still, you chose long brown envelopes to send half your month’s earnings to your parents; you always used the bills that Juan gave you because those were crisp, unlike the tips. Every month. You didn’t write a letter. There was nothing to write about.
The first weeks you wanted to write though, because you had stories to tell. You wanted to write about the surprising openness of people in America, how eagerly they told you about their mother fighting cancer, about their sister-in-law’s preemie—things people should hide, should reveal only to the family members who wished them well. You wanted to write about the way people left so much food on their plates and crumpled a few dollar bills down, as though it were an offering, expiation for the wasted food. You wanted to write about the child who started to cry and pull at her blond hair and instead of the parents making her shut up, they pleaded with her and then they all got up and left.
You wanted to write about the rich Americans who wore shabby clothes and tattered sneakers, who looked like the night watchmen in front of the large compounds in Lagos. You wanted to write about the poor people who were fat and the rich people who were thin. And you wanted to write that everybody in America did not have a big house and car; you still were not sure about the guns, though, because they might have them inside their bags and pockets.
It wasn’t just your parents you wanted to write, it was your friends, and cousins and aunts and uncles. But you could never afford enough perfumes and clothes and handbags and shoes to go around and still pay your rent on the waitressing job so you wrote nobody.
Nobody knew where you were because you told no one. Sometimes you felt invisible and tried to walk through your room wall into the hallway and when you bumped into the wall, it left bruises on your arms. Once, Juan asked if you had a man w
ho hit you because he would take care of him, and you laughed a mysterious laugh.
At nights, something wrapped itself around your neck, something that very nearly always choked you before you woke up.
Some people thought you were from Jamaica because they thought that every black person with an accent was Jamaican. Or some who guessed that you were African asked if you knew so and so from Kenya or so and so from Zimbabwe because they thought Africa was a country where everyone knew everyone else.
So when he asked you, in the dimness of the restaurant after you recited the daily specials, what African country you were from, you said Nigeria and expected him to ask if you knew a friend he had made in Senegal or Botswana. But he asked if you were Yoruba or Igbo, because you didn’t have a Fulani face. You were surprised—you thought he must be a professor of anthropology, a little young but who was to say? Igbo, you said. He asked your name and said Akunna was pretty. He did not ask what it meant, fortunately, because you were sick of how people said, Father’s Wealth? You mean, like, your father will actually sell you to a husband?
He had been to Ghana and Kenya and Tanzania, he had read about all the other African countries, their histories, their complexities. You wanted to feel disdain, to show it as you brought his order, because white people who liked Africa too much and who liked Africa too little were the same—condescending. But he didn’t act like he knew too much, didn’t shake his head in the superior way a professor back at the Maine community college once did as he talked about Angola, didn’t show any condescension. He came in the next day and sat at the same table, and when you asked if the chicken was okay, he asked you something about Lagos. He came in the second day and talked for so long—asking you often if you didn’t think Mobutu and Idi Amin were similar—you had to tell him it was against restaurant policy. He brushed your hand when you placed the coffee down. The third day, you told Juan you didn’t want that table anymore.
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