is Reading Chick Lit Good for You?

No.

From a story in the Huffington Post...

Readers of chick lit beware -- the woman-targeted fiction genre might not be as harmless as it seems. Reading about a protagonist with low body-esteem could affect how you feel about your own appearance. 

New research from Virginia Tech suggests that chick-lit novels with protagonists who express negative feelings about their bodies can influence readers' weight concerns and how they perceive their own sexual attractiveness.

The Problem with Dead Narrators

Novels with dead young girls narrating seems to have hardened into a genre of its own. Leila Sales examines the paradox of a protagonist who doesn’t have to deal with consequences. 

From the piece on the Daily Beast...

For most of the book, Brie is able to interact with our world only in the way that ghosts are supposed to. For example, her dog, Hamloaf, sees her even though she is invisible to humans, and he does that crazy barking thing that causes dog owners to say, “For Chrissakes, there’s no one at the door.” Occasionally, when Brie focuses very hard, her loved ones can briefly sense her, can hear her whispering in their ears. There is one scene in which Brie sends a text message, which is a little more high tech than ghost mythology usually goes, but otherwise the world is beyond her reach. It is changed by her death, but not by her actions.

Why do we care? If the protagonist can do anything she wants—run all over San Francisco, swim through the ocean, show up at her friends’ parties—but none of these actions affect anything on Earth, then do they even matter? This is the challenge of writing about dead girls, and every one of those bestselling authors had to deal with it.

The Death of Chick Lit?

Laura Miller poses that question at Salon.

From the article...

These were gothics, a subgenre of romantic suspense, which was (sort of) a subgenre of romance. (Also: The gothic is not to be confused with the venerable literary mode referred to as the Gothic.) Taking their pattern from original works like Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca,” the drugstore paperback gothics were highly formulaic tales of shy young women who came to work in stately manors full of strange doings and ominous secrets. These novels were once a mainstay of the pulp market, and publishers churned them out. (The Marxist critic Raymond Williams was said to be very fond of them.)

You can still find battered old gothics in junk shops and used bookstores, but as an instantly identifiable genre they’re no longer being published. Other expired genres, one-time staples of train-station book stalls and corner newsstands, include the exotic adventure yarn (perfected by writers like H. Rider Haggard and Edgar Rice Burroughs) and the inspirational rags-to-riches bildungsroman now identified exclusively with Horatio Alger. Other genres, like the western, are still being published, but just barely.

What kills a genre isn’t always clear. Supposedly, the readership for the western turned to urban crime fiction sometime in the 1970s. Why? Were they simply tired of cowboys and gunslingers, or had the myth of the Old West been too thoroughly undermined by counterculture critics and Native American activists? Other genres, like a certain flavor of softcore fictional titillation epitomized by the stewardess “memoir” “Coffee, Tea or Me?” — naughty, but not quite explicit enough to qualify as “adult books” — were made superfluous by the increased availability of straightforward porn.

The Eat Pray Love Merchandising Machine

The Julia Roberts movie has fueled a $350 million industry based on chick lit. But inside the numbers, the book looks less like a business juggernaut—and more like an innovative Hollywood marketing campaign. The Daily Beast has more, here.

From the piece...

The film's release catapulted the movie tie-in version of the paperback back onto the top of bestseller lists.

Meanwhile, for all the snickering about how a classic testosterone movie, The Expendables, beat out Julia Roberts et al. at the box office this weekend, a Sony source says that the movie will wind up generating close to $175 million in ticket sales this year worldwide, according to internal projections.

Perhaps most interesting, however, are the dozens of licensed products and knockoffs that are fairly unprecedented for a movie where the core audience is around 40. Sony cut a deal with HSN, and the shopping network devoted three full days of programming during the first weekend of August to Eat Pray Love-themed merchandise, some of which remains available on HSN.com.

The network would not comment on the viewership over that period, but said that it was "very pleased with the performance" and more than 100 products sold out during the event. Some featured products, like beaded bracelets and pillow shams, evoke the Italy-India-Bali theme of the story. (Gilbert structured her book into 108 "tales" in deference to the number of beads on a prayer bead necklace; HSN included a $350 prayer bead necklace.) Other products, such as Perlier's body cream and shower gel, were licensed, under the EPL banner.