Welcome to 1997, Maureen Dowd! It’s good to have you! For the next ten years, I’m going to lead you through what struggling young authors (who happen to be female), have endured, regardless of their merit, their talent, their stories, their publishing house or the books they’ve written.

You see, Maureen, chick-lit is not a niche, and hasn’t been a “niche” market, as you call it since… Well, since its inception. Long before you noticed a bevy of pink books in your local Borders. Is the new generation of books geared toward women of a particular lifestyle, with an empathic slant, a marketing ploy developed by the major publishing houses based on the success of fantastic books about strong female protagonists such as The Girls Guide to Hunting and Fishing, which was written far ahead of its time? Well, sort of. That was the idea, I gather.

Real chick-lit, as you are describing it, the less than ingenious, more soap-opera quality, non-challenging material I’ve always referred to as “beach books,” started long before I was a writer, and long before 1997. And it found massive success far before the bookshelves oozed martini from their pages.

My first World AIDS Day was in 1981, when I was sitting in a thatch hut in a small Senegalese village listening to the BBC and heard the news from America about a “mysterious virus that had been discovered in homosexual and bisexual men.” I had thought I had run far enough away from my conflicted sexual life by joining the Peace Corps, but when that announcer in London let loose upon the world the word AIDS, it was as if the world had shrunk and the great African sun had turned pale.

My second World AIDS Day came on a chilly April morning in Chicago. I’d snuck out of my North Side neighborhood to a public health clinic on the near South Side to get results from a test nobody wants to take. I remember the young African American men sitting in silence with their baseball caps pulled like mine down over their eyes. I remember the voice of the Latina social worker, “you weren’t expecting this, were you?”

For the next few years I didn’t celebrate any World AIDS Days. I went on no walks. I went to no fundraisers. I wore no red ribbons. When I heard that word—that word that lived inside my body on television, I turned it off. Every day was for me World AIDS Day. I’d joined a worldwide tribe growing larger by some 3,000 every day. I didn’t need to be reminded.