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No such thing as chick lit with a brain

30 September 2006

Celia Walden finds the Los Angeles chattering classes obsessed by a book which tries to give a much-mocked genre a cerebral makeover. Too bad it fails utterly

If, like me, you are allergic to chick lit, the chances are that the problem has as much to do with the fatuousness of the heroines’ interests as with the quality of the prose. Jimmy Choo? Lovely shoes, but I have no inclination to discuss them over a bottle of wine. Men? Love them too, but I don’t want to talk about them as a category either. So what if someone were to write chick lit that’s intellectual — for birds with brains? Is the very notion an oxymoron that could alienate two opposing armies of female readers at a blow? Or could it be the start of a whole new literary genre?

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