The phrase ‘Chick Lit’ is ‘irritating and insulting’ to female writers, according to award-winning author Sheila O’Flanagan.
She was speaking after best-selling author Marian Keyes warned that the ‘diminishing’ phrase was making women ashamed to pick up her books.
In the new Imagine series on the BBC, the Limerick author said the phrase is “almost a slur” and noted that books about the lives of men are not “diminished or demeaned in the same way”.
On Newstalk Breakfast this morning, The Missing Wife author Sheila O’Flanagan said she fully agreed.
“I have thought that for a long time,” she said. “Any woman who is writing and is now put into that bracket of Chick Lit does feel as if it is an insult and it is being used as an insult.
“In fact, I was out with a group of successful writers recently and we all agreed there is a lack of respect when it comes to female writers who are writing commercial fiction – even though, like with Marian, they also cover some very sensitive and dark topics.”
Ms O’Flanagan said some of the best-known male writers would never have been nominated for awards if they were women.
“I think there is a structural thing and that goes to all parts of society where originally the gatekeepers of literature would all have been male,” she said. “Historically, women had to use male pen names to get their books published.
“I look at somebody like Colm Tóibín, who is an absolutely great writer no question about that, but I know that if Brooklyn had been written by a woman it would not have been shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
“It would have gone straight on to the historical romantic fiction shelf and it would have stayed there.
“Even if it had been written by Maeve Binchy - and it is a book very much in the same mode that Maeve Binchy would write, with those kinds of characters - Maeve Binchy wouldn’t have been nominated for the Booker Award either.”
She said the phrase ‘Chick Lit’ was first used around the time the Bridget Jones books were published in the 90s.
“They were comic writing you know? It was about light-hearted women writing for women and ‘Chick Lit’ kind of encapsulated that – but then it got used for everything written by a woman that wasn’t high-brow literary fiction,” she said.
“That meant everything was being judged on, is it frothy? Is it light? Even when books are, like Marian’s books, comic books that are dealing with much more difficult subjects.
“So, it becomes irritating and it becomes insulting.”
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Main image shows author Sheila O’Flanagan. Image: Grand Central Publishing/Laurie Fletcher
