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Sunday 12 October 2008

No such thing as chick lit with a brain

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

Literacy and Longing in LA is becoming a talking point of the American literary classes by setting itself the brave task of finding the answer. Written by a Golden Globe Award-winning film producer and a Los Angeles Times journalist, Karen Mack and Jennifer Kaufman, the novel focuses on the life and loves of an out of work journalist named Eudora Welty. Dora is your quintessential chick-lit heroine: thirtysomething, single, with self-esteem issues and acres of time on her hands in which to obsess about the two interlinked questions of supreme importance in her life — cellulite and finding the right man. Except that instead of indulging in Marlboro Lights, magnums of Chardonnay and designer shops to assuage her emotional traumas, Dora binges on books. ‘Women do different things when they’re depressed. Some smoke, others drink, some call their therapists, some eat. ... I do what I have always done: go off on a book bender that can last for days. I fall into this state for different reasons ...it’s symptomatic of my state of mind, ennui up to my ears, my life gone awry, and that feeling of dread when-ever I’m asked what I’m doing. How can anyone sort all this out? All things considered, I’d rather read. It’s the perfect escape.’

Not that our heroine reads indiscriminately. Yet nor does she subscribe to Gertrude Stein’s wise words: ‘You should only read what is truly good or what is frankly bad.’ Dora is an alcoholic who can only drink grand cru. And this little lady reads Flaubert, not just for the story but because ‘I heard a critic say that the book exposes all the hollowness and fragility of youthful ideals and is an insidious devaluation of the power of love....I get a rush these days from the inevitable pitfalls of the human condition.’

In keeping with her less literary counterparts, Dora likes to disconnect the phone and run herself a bubble bath, before getting hopped-up on a killer cocktail of Hemingway and the Brontë sisters. The aftermath of these excesses is described in much the same way as one of Bridget Jones’s hangovers: ‘My eyes are bloodshot and I have bruised circles beneath them. My matted hair is sticking up in clumps and my eyebrows look like someone combed them with a whisk. I am surrounded by the wreckage of my apartment, where heaps of discarded clothes lie.’

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