Chick Lit Rules

[angerona]

in chick lit, when a working woman gets pregnant, she starts making plan for leaving work after she gives birth (and sometimes long before it). If she's single and the father is not in the picture, the book may make a nod towards reality and so the woman will make contingency plans for working part-time. Most of it from home. Why? Tell me, why? Why do the page after page she's contemplating the change in her life situation, the tight budget and future lack of vacations, but never a thought is spared to working full-time. The single answer looms: a working mother is a bad mother. And this girl may be a careless, absent-minded, obsessed with her loser of an ex-boyfriend, but gosh darn it she's not going to be a "BAD MOTHER"(tm).

there are only two types of professions for women in chick lit: (1) something in marketing/journalism and (2) A LAWYER. Just like that, in all caps.

A marketing-cum-journalist chick comes with the following accessories: an editor (female or male, somewhat strict, but generally fairly understanding when it's needed), an evil or annoying co-worker, and a sympathetic coworker with whom she can bitch about the evil-coworker and the editor-boss.

The lawyer-chicks come in two flavors, depending on whether she is a leading character or a supporting cast member. A leading character is always over-busy over-worked and either hates her lawyerly job or will realize by the end of the book that she does (and more likely than not will quit it). A supporting character is also an over-busy and over-worked lawyer, but happens to love her job and stays in it till the end of the book.

That's it. No other professions are allowed; I suppose because one can't easily identify with them or something. Or perhaps late twenty- and young thirty- somethings female these days really do work only two types of jobs, unless they are a complete anomaly and a freak. How would I know?

It is acceptable and even expected for the heroine to be somewhat plump and to want to lose weight. But the cardinal rule of all chick lit is that she is not allowed to lose weight by through perseverance, exercise and changing her diet. Don't take me wrong, the characters may and do lose weight, it just happens through deus ex machina, and the means are as creative as their authors' fantasy. I've seen: spending hours on a stationary bike, completely unaware of it, in a postpartum depression-anger haze; walking the streets day in and day out and not eating properly, also because of sadness, depression and anger; walking dogs because she lost her job as a lawyer; spending lots of time on her feet because she became a housekeeper because of her troubles at her job as -- you guessed it -- a lawyer; not eating out of worry or anxiety; and the one to top them all: waking up without any memory of the past four years only to discover that during those same years she's lost a lot of weight, gained killer muscles and obtained some sleek plastic surgery.

I'm sure there are plenty more other creative inventions as to how to lose weight. But I'll be completely shocked if you tell me of a book where the heroine lost weight through the mundane means of forcing herself to exercise and diet.

For every "true love" subplot, there must be another romantic subplot that looks quite feasible from the beginning and some guy that seems fairly attractive, but is discovered to have some major character flaw at the end.

You know what's most true to life in chick lit? Names. I love how the characters are named: the names are always appropriate to their age, background and heritage. That's something I can't nitpick on. In the latest book I read: "Certain Girls" by Jennifer Weiner, there's a teenage popular girl, named Amber Gross, and a comment that with such a name, you'd think she'd get at least some teasing, but it's as if she was immune. That was the part where I had to stop and nod vigorously. There was Erin Gross in my high school, and she too was very popular (well, at least among our nerdy crowd -- there she was considered to be extremely cool and pretty), despite the unfortunate name.