Yet Another "Hey, What's With All the Chick Lit?" Story

In which the usual sorts of questions get asked: Do we have to call it chick lit? Is this good for the feminists? What's with all the pink (steadily being replaced by aqua)? And is it art? For that last question, they turn to Princeton's Elaine Showalter (and, though they don't mention it, a former TV critic for People):

"With some of these writers, people will look back in a century and think, this is the way it was for young women then. Some will be ephemeral and lost. Under the guise of this rubric, some of these women are writing really fine work about what women face in these times."

Erica Jong, on the other hand, is appalled at the suggestion that Fear of Flying contributed anything to the genre, because she hates all the books in it for being about women who want to get married instead of women who just want to get laid (or, as she puts it, not about "the disappointments of marriage and the search for freedom and individuality"). But as sales of chick lit books continue to climb, the reporter seems to be the only person who really gives a damn what Erica Jong thinks.