“It was kind of a bummer to see more ‘literary’ female authors sort of joining in the condescension,” says Weiner, the scare quotes around “literary” almost audible. She likens the women who railed against chick lit to the female apparatchiks—apparatchicks?—in the Trump administration. “The closer you are to power, which is white men, it’s like you align yourself with the voices that are pointing at someone else. And by extension, you are not that thing. But the thing about that kind of power, I guess, is you only have it until the people who are giving it to you decide to take it away.”
And eventually, like all trends, chick lit did fade away. Perhaps it’s because publishing is characterized by boom-and-bust cycles. Perhaps, as Weiner points out, the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent recession dimmed the public’s appetite for frothy stories about the pursuit of Birkin bags. Perhaps crossover YA hits like Twilight and The Hunger Games ate into the genre’s core demo.
The final nail in the coffin may have been Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, a 2012 juggernaut that primed the public for twisty, femme-centric thrillers—a hunger that still hasn’t faded. To sell a chick-lit-adjacent book now, you’d need a dead body. Weiner and Sykes have both seen the writing on the wall, following their chick lit classics with murder mysteries of their own.
