Emily Hill Emily Hill

Spare me the cult of Sally Rooney

‘Chic lit’ has turned terrible books into status symbols

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I have invented a new literary category, chic lit, to describe all the books written by elite females (Lena Dunham, Caitlin Moran, Elizabeth Day, Dolly Alderton, Sally Rooney, ad infinitum) for elite females. If you’re not one and can’t stand any of them, god help you. Their books will be forced on you anyway. Publishers can’t hear you scream. There is no metric for books kicked around living rooms or dumped in charity shops. Sally Rooney’s Normal People, for instance, is the worst novel I’ve ever finished. I had to. I was that appalled.

According to Fleabag star Phoebe Waller-Bridge, all a woman wants nowadays is ‘someone to tell me what to eat, what to like, what to hate, what to rage about, what to listen to, what band to like, what to buy tickets for, what to joke about, what not to joke about… what to believe in, who to vote for, and who to love, and how to tell them’. Add to that, and most important: what to read. For highbrow status, the Booker Prize shortlist (out now) will do the job, but to be a woman really worth contending with, you must have waded through the chic lit canon.

The American website Vox explains: ‘It is now aspirational to be the kind of person who has read Sally Rooney. She is a signifier of a certain kind of literary chic: if you read Sally Rooney… you’re smart, but you’re also fun — and you’re also cool enough to be suspicious of both “smart” and “fun” as general concepts.’

‘And do you, Angela, agree to undergo a course of critical race theory…’

Normal People, Rooney’s second novel, has sold two million copies and counting, making it the finest example of chic lit on the market. It appeared on GQ’s ‘30 Fail-Safe Gifts for Her’ and is loved by all whom Patrick Bateman would want to kill.

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