Remember Me, the Twenties Girl !!!!! :-)

‘Chick lit' – you don't see the same belittling line taken with male writers. You can picturize me as one crazy girl with a chick lit book, sitting in my pyjamas, eating munchies and wondering from where the crying baby in the flat below suddenly materialised.

I am not obsessed about reading chick lits but it seems to me to come in for an extraordinary amount of bile and patronising comment which I rarely see applied to novels by men in the same vein. Books – both fiction and non-fiction – reflecting women's lives, whether young or old, are labelled. Hence "chick-lit": often a derogatory term used to mean books by young women having fun in life, partying and being silly about boys, without the thought that novels by women about women might accurately reflect their lives and thus have merit or, at the very least, relevance.
It winds me up that books about young women are seen as frivolous and silly, while books about young men's lives that cover the same topics, are reviewed and debated, seen as valid and interesting contributions to the current social and media scene. Take anything from Toby Young's How To Lose Friends to David Nicholls's One Day to even Chetan Bhagat’s Five point someone and 2 States. Often these books are far more sensationalist than those by the authors' female counterparts. I'm not saying they're bad books: I'm just saying they aren't belittled and dismissed in the same way on the grounds of their subject-matter.

The truth is, women happily read books (and watch films and TV) aimed primarily at men. That's because women buy more and read more, full stop. They read thrillers, travel books, biographies – and yet the majority of these books are marketed for men. Women know they'll like it and give it a go. They'll happily pick up a copy of Porno too, with a plastic female sex doll on the front. But men rarely try women's fiction, because they've been conditioned to think they can't pick up a book with a pink cover.

It's a real shame, because if you want to read someone who reflects women (and men's) lives with authenticity and sharp observation, someone whose books will absorb you and make you cry or laugh, there are so many options. You can do no better than Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, or the priestess of commercial women's fiction, Marian Keyes. For me, The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank is note-perfect, one of the best books of the last 10 years. Lauren Weisberger's The Devil Wears Prada is like a thriller of first-job hell, it's so aptly written. And Sophie Kinsella (Shopaholic, Remember Me, Domestic Goddess or Twenties girl) is a genius. Her books are totally gripping, beautifully written, heartbreaking and hilarious. But I have yet to see a review of her which reflects this, except in few magazines, which takes its commercial fiction seriously.

It amuses me when people say, "Oh, you are getting influenced by Sophie’s books and Rebecca Bloomwood". There's something a little patronizing about the tone of it, whereas books by young men are compared to older male writers as if it's a coronation, a welcoming to the literary canon. And quite often I'm left wanting to go – huh? I don't get it. There's room for both. And I know which I'd prefer to read ;-p