Guest blog by Valerie Taylor
Do you remember the “Guess Your Weight” game at carnivals?
I bet I can guess how old you are, or at least in what decade you were born, simply by your reaction to a new television commercial by Knix, a lingerie company targeting mature women.
Surely, you’ve seen it. With scantily clad women of all shapes and sizes lined up across the screen, the voice-over tells us, “It’s time we remind the world that women over 50 still exist.”
Do you nod your head and whisper, “You betcha,” or do you chew your nails, vowing never to age?
I shout, “Bravo, Knix!”
Moreover, I say it’s high time we remind the publishing industry that in the United States alone 75 million mature women exist. Women who have the resources to buy books. Women who want to read relationship-driven stories that accurately expose real life. Like the way Knix portrays real women.
Readers of my newly released novel, What’s Not Said, tell me they find it “refreshing to read a book with characters that are not in their 20s!” Adding, “Can we…appreciate a book that talks about love after the not so happily-ever after?”
I suspect many readers of women’s fiction today launched the chick lit genre twenty-five years ago. In the decades since twenty and thirty-somethings popularized Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, they have matured and so have their book choices.
Thank goodness chick lit is dead!
Or is it? My theory is that it’s morphed into a sub-category of women’s fiction I fondly call “chick lit for the mature woman.” As such, I think it’s high time writers and Hollywood recognize this phenomenon. Imagine, for instance, how fun it would’ve been had Diane Keaton ridden off with Keanu Reeve rather than Jack Nicholson in Something’s Gotta Give?
Instead of young, perfect women in search of the perfect man in chick lit of yore, flawed females (and men, for that matter) grace the pages of today’s novels. And while they still enjoy stories that make them laugh, women will stay up half the night reading emotional stories about dysfunctional families, infidelity, discrimination, abuse, and more. Why? Because they relate to these characters, they are them.
Consider the following four books that illustrate my point.
Land of Last Chances (She Writes Press, 2019) by Joan Cohen may be a novel, but it’s about real-life situations. Drawing from some of her own personal and professional experiences, Ms. Cohen crafts a complex story. As we journey into the mind of Jeanne Bridgeton, a forty-eight-year-old, single, marketing executive, she struggles with the possibility of a genetic predisposition to early-onset dementia and what it means for her career and future well-being. With each turn of the page, our own philosophy and principles are challenged.
What if you’re in your fifties and your husband suddenly walks out on you? That’s the dilemma Camille Pagán skillfully addresses in Woman Last Seen in Her Thirties (Lake Union Publishing, 2018). As Maggie Harris examines her past and the risk of taking a road less traveled, so do we reflect on our own lives, wondering how people saw us way back when and perhaps judge us now.
Building a house becomes a metaphor for life and relationships in As Long As It’s Perfect (She Writes Press, 2019) by Lisa Tognola. Most readers can relate to Janie Margolis as she balances her own desires for a perfect house, along with a perfect life, with the realities of parenting, job insecurity, money woes, and even a bit of mid-life extra-marital temptation.
Though David Nicholls may not consider his books in the same genre as those above, he might be pleased to know that Us (Harper Collins, 2014) influences my writing. Told from the husband’s perspective, Nicholls explores what happens to the Petersen’s well after the wedding vows are spoken. He encounters the tribulations of parenting a seventeen-year-old son at the same time his wife talks divorce. By combining humor and anxiety, Nicholls creates flawed characters and a truly relatable story. Could the title of this gem actually mean “us” the reader, rather than the Petersen’s?
Whether defined as fiction, women’s fiction, or chick lit for the mature woman, each of these stories appeals especially to women weighing the status of their own relationships and sorting through their own emotions.
“In the meantime, those looking for fun, feminist reads should take heed of the old cliché and not judge a book by its possibly pink cover.”*
* “It’s the Return of Chick Lit—But Did the 90’s Most Divisive Genre Ever Go Anywhere,” by Sabrina Maddeaux on Medium.
Valerie Taylor is the author of the pink-covered debut novel, What’s Not Said (She Writes Press, 2020). The sequel What’s Not True (She Writes Press) will publish August 2021. Follow her at valerietaylorauthor.com and facebook.com/ValerieTaylorAuthor.
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