BROOKE GLADSTONE: First, there was literature. And that begat, in the waning years of the last century, chick lit, which in turn spawned lady lit and bride lit and mom lit and Latina lit and Black chick lit and Asian chick lit and Christian chick lit and, inevitably, making a big splash this spring and summer, lad lit. But what sparked this literary mitosis or, put another way, from whose womb sprang all these "lits?" [TAPE FROM BRIDGET JONES DIARY] [MUSIC]

BRIDGET JONES: It all began on New Year's Day in my 32nd year of being single. Once again, I found myself on my own and going to my mother's annual-- [CAR DOOR OPEN/CLOSE] Turkey curry buffet. Every year she tries to fix me up with some bushy-haired, middle-aged bore, and I feared this year would be no exception.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:It was the literary imagination of Helen Fielding that gave birth to "Bridget Jones Diary," a blockbuster novel that was made into a blockbuster movie. Fielding is widely regarded as the godmother of chick lit, and if literary sub-genres were children, Bridget Jones would be the world's most fecund single mom. [MONTAGE: EVERYONE SAYING THEY LOVE BRIDGET JONES]

WOMAN: You know, this started in the mid-1990s with Bridget Jones's Diary, which we all know...

MAN: I loved Bridget Jones' Diary.

WOMAN: Bridget Jones books are a lot of fun from a writerly perspective...

MAN: I think Helen Fielding's a great writer, the one who did Bridget Jones's Diary...

WOMAN: And Bridget Jones' Diary, I mean it's sort of hard to improve on...

MAN: I've actually never even read Bridget Jones's Diary...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Jennifer Weiner's is one of the many literary voices you just heard -- you'll hear from them all again -- who pay deference to Fielding. Weiner's novel, "Good in Bed," was about an overweight woman who undergoes some humiliation, faces and conquers her fears, and achieves success. Quintessential chick lit, it was an international bestseller.

JENNIFER WEINER: I would say that chick lit is any novel where you have a smart, spunky, benighted, female heroine who is anywhere between maybe 22 and 40-ish who will, in the course of the novel, have awful things happen to her, but will persevere, usually with her cadre of eccentric friends, her semi-dysfunctional family, and perhaps a pet.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now, does she have to be spunky? Or could she be feisty?

JENNIFER WEINER:[LAUGHS] She has to be one or the other. I mean she can't be mopey, she can't be introspective. She can be quirky, and, you know, she usually works in publishing --that's a big sort of trope --

ANJULA RAZDAN: --and it's usually a lot of sort of complaints about crappy bosses and looking for Mr. Right, and there's a lot of kind of Prada bags and Jimmy Choo shoes.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:

ANJULA RAZDAN: wrote about contemporary chick lit in the latest issue of Utne magazine. She observes that when it's chick lit, you really can tell a book by its cover.

ANJULA RAZDAN:: They're usually pastel colored, kind of Easter egg shades. They usually have kind of retro icons of Martini glasses or handbags or pumps on them, and you know, this isn't big-canvas storytelling. It's kind of the mundane, everyday, obsessive and superficial details of women's lives, and I find that comforting to read...

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Now the book world is comforting women in the form of ever-closer approximations of themselves. Wait long enough, and even if you're a half-black, quarter-Asian, quarter-Latino 40-ish office manager based in Milwaukee, there'll be a genre just for you, and it'll have the quirky friends you don't have time for, the pet your landlord won't allow, and the guy you never got to meet. I threw in 40-ish, because as the authors' of chick lit age, so do the obsessions of their characters. For instance, Weiner's next book, due out in September, is about the perils of being a mom. Anjula Razden of Utne Magazine.

ANJULA RAZDAN:: As with any genre, whether it's chick lit or horror or mystery, you have the good, bad and the really bad.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's pause for a moment and consider the bad. Last Sunday's New York Times Book Review offered this exuberant pan of a new bit of chick lit, "Bergdorf Blonds," by Plum Sykes. Reviewer Choire Sicha says the book was so bad, it should inspire readers to rise up and rip each other limbless. He went on:

CHOIRE SICHA: In all seriousness, we must build a tiny apocalypse-proof time capsule. If we can resist the temptation to burn Plum Sykes's book, we can smuggle it into the future. Perhaps the next breed of humanoids can learn from the holocaust of culture and commerce that destroyed our icky civilization.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:So, like any lit, chick lit can be prey to bad writing. But good or bad, certain feminists believe that chick lit is almost always sending the wrong message about success.

HANNA BLANK: What this particular genre tells us is that we haven't yet reached a point with feminist change, where women can set the terms by which they are defined. These characters are examining what they're taught to examine in order to be perfect by other people's standards.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Hanna Blank writes criticism, novels and lesbian erotica. She says the heroines of chick lit all find their way to fulfillment along the same narrow path: a well-paying job, a devoted boyfriend.

HANNA BLANK: And you're not shown women who are trying to rebel against what they're given in terms of what's supposed to make a good life for a woman or what's supposed to make a woman successful.

ANJULA RAZDEN: And I just think that's too much of a burden for light entertainment reading to bear.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Anjula Razden.

ANJULA RAZDEN:We're in the midst of what some people call third wave feminism or lipstick feminism. Some people think it's a post-feminist age, but part of that is that, you know, we can have our trashy beach reads, and our intellectual reads, and we can sort of be successful and feminist and still think about boys and lipstick and our weight, and it doesn't make us any less of, of a feminist...we don't have to be our best selves at all times.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: But Hanna Blank sees a cultural playing field that is not yet level.

HANNA BLANK:Until we have a guy lit that is a parallel to chick lit, the best we can do is to look at the action hero genre of, of novels that are aimed at men and say, okay, this is what men are doing for their entertainment reading. They're given these idealized versions of what men are supposed to be like, and here's what women are given. Here's what's marketed to them.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:But we do have a guy lit that is parallel to chick lit that is at least partly directed at men. It's called lad lit, and publishers are hoping that both guys and gals will buy it. There's even a male Helen Fielding who's godfather to the genre. His name is Nick Hornby. His books "Hi Fidelity" and "About a Boy" have already played at a theater near you, and though his work has never sold as well as Fielding's, publishers are piling on the lad lit. Hornby looms so large that first-time novelist Kyle Smith pays him homage in his new book, "Love Monkey," published by William Morrow.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Read from that section.

KYLE SMITH:[READING] "Every girl I know has read his book, and they all want, or think they want, to meet a guy like the guy in the book. More specifically, they want to meet the guy who wrote the book. What must a party be like for that guy? He must get home from the pub, and empty his jacket pockets and go -- who's phone number is this? And why is it written on a pair of panties? He wrote the world's longest personal ad and got paid for it."

BROOKE GLADSTONE:In "Love Monkey," the Bridget Jones character is named Tom Farrell, and yes, he works in publishing, at a tabloid modeled after the New York Post, where Smith once worked.

KYLE SMITH: I think the men will identify with the character cause I think a lot of guys have been in the same situation that the guy in "Love Monkey" is in, like they're trying to be smooth and suave and trying to woo a woman, and I think for women, the advantage is that they'll sort of see inside the male mind.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:That is, if they want to. The release of "Love Monkey" was covered everywhere from Time Magazine to Men's Health to scores of newspapers, but it sold fewer than 2,000 copies in its first six weeks, according to Nielsen Bookscan. According to Publisher's Weekly, lad lit has already hit the skids. Chicks didn't buy it. Lads didn't buy it.

CHOIRE SICHA: I can imagine. You know, men are just now getting trained to use moisturizer and wear clothes without pleats.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Writer and reviewer Choire Sicha.

CHOIRE SICHA: So they now must be taught by the commerce powers-that-be that they're supposed to read lad lit.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Thus, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, People magazine declared this spring that chick lit is out, and lad lit is in. To that end, Pocketbooks is releasing three lad lit titles this summer. Maybe they'll sell better in hot weather. There's a kind of sweet revenge all this. It's an old saw that men aren't interested in stories about women, though women will consume stories about men. That's probably still true when it comes to movies, but women buy the novels. They've always bought the novels. And, for the moment, the buyers of chick lit of every age, race, religion and nationality would much rather contemplate themselves, or least, parts of themselves.

CRAIG BURKE: There have been stories published in a lot of the trade publications that legs on books --women's legs -- work.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Craig Burke is publicity director of several Penguin imprints.

CRAIG BURKE: I, I don't know if that's true, but we've certainly put a lot of legs on covers. This year, for some reason, there are a lot of disembodied feet on books...

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Here's looking at you, kid.

BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was directed by Katya Rogers and produced by Janeen Price, Megan Ryan and Tony Field, and edited-- by Brooke. Dylan Keefe is our technical director, and Rob Christiansen our engineer; we had help from Derek John. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. [THEME MUSIC UP AND UNDER] This is On the Media, from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG]

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