Little Earthquakes, by Jennifer Weiner

First of all, I couldn’t possibly overstate the importance of Little Earthquakes (not this book, the Tori Amos album) in my fifth-grade emotional development. I wrote out the lyrics in glitter pen and stared at them while pondering my heart as an impossible cyclone of bittersweet, abstract longing. You too can experience this feeling by watching this YouTube video of the PS22 kids doing “1000 Oceans.” I’m not even embarrassed to admit this, because that album was good.

Anyway, I’m steadily chipping away at my credibility as a person whose blog you should read–but in pursuit of absolutely nothing, I’ll press on. Jennifer Weiner sells a lot of books and In Her Shoes was made into a Cameron Diaz movie so I figured she was worth checking out–and, well, this book is fine. It’s nowhere near as superficial as Lauren Weisberger’s mind-polluting social climber oeuvre, and it details the lives of normal, intelligent working women (with a basketball player’s wife and an ex-celebrity actress thrown in for the always necessary glam-factor). The book is about pregnancy and money and babies and whatever–a bunch of “women things” that will eventually be important to me but will hopefully never be important enough to make me think that every little detail related to said “women things” is automatically interesting.

Jennifer Weiner has vehemently defended the idea of chick lit before–”Female protagonist, urban setting, smart, sarcastic voice. I don’t see why it matters if you’re thrown into this category,” she says in one interview. I realized after reading this book that that’s not my problem with chick lit (and really, that definition is missing a crucial “who thinks about only herself” clause after the female protagonist part). What bothers me about chick lit is the way it makes women–occasionally including myself–glom onto the minutae of someone’s feminine exploits in the vague hope that the accumulation of details will eventually provide some sort of key to understanding (and perhaps also magically transforming) their own lives. I get a feeling that this is a big reason why, for women, every single relationship story seems individual and fascinating; why else would people continue to watch the Bachelor, which is the same every season as well as every episode? Sure, it’s entertaining to watch girls put on tiny dresses and act sincere for some man who probably not only shaves but also airbrush-tans his chest–but there’s a more than a little of “If I see enough love stories, I’ll figure out my own” in the viewership. And, since we assume that the love story is complete once everyone’s partaken of tiny truffle mac-and-cheese bowls at the wedding, this phenomenon can be assumed to go even farther–to a world where stretch marks replace high heels, but the need for shared attention is the same. There are 3.9 million mommy bloggers out there.

When I brought this up with my boyfriend, he said that the energy that women put into this sort of endless, life-normalizing support group behavior is the energy that men put into sports and misogyny. This strikes me as a good assessment, and I don’t mean to imply that either gender has a lock on narrow, superficial fixations. He also said that most people of both genders don’t even see the attraction of not being superficial, which is a chilling (but probably decently accurate) thought. And women may be the primary audience for anodyne, internal-affairs chicky business, but they also make up 80% of the fiction market–so there’s that. Don’t get me wrong with all of this! I think women comprise the better half of the world by a long shot. I just think they (we) are getting fooled by chick lit and everything like it.

The fact is: these stories about women in whatever form have a legitimate veneer of insight on the female experience, but in reality are creating a false idea that a woman’s life has to revolve around an anti-intellectual beehive of relationships, shoes and status; that a woman’s emotional state is something akin to how I conceived it in fifth grade while listening to the other Little Earthquakes–something important, absorptive, and worth hours of daily maintenance and attention. Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes, despite being very well-written for its genre, was about as insightful as a cocktail napkin with a saying on it.

Forever, by Judy Blume

Like every other half-assedly “creative” type who would really love to write a masterpiece (or something publishable) but in reality gets distracted by shiny objects and dark beers too often to ever amount to anything, I come to most of my “writing ideas” already preparing to shut them down.

Still, I’ve gone through phases where I briefly got behind a lengthy project: a literary novel about an evangelical camping trip where the sun never comes up, the chick-lit novel that got stolen, a series of travel essays that were also pilfered by some anonymous Kyrgyz dick. I’ve toyed with the idea of gimmick-authorship, doing something stupid for a year and writing about it (although saying yes to every guy who asks you out and abstaining from toilet paper and elevators is out, I think I could make My Year Stalking Junot Diaz into a real charmer). There’s also the possibility of writing a heinously bourgeois nonfiction niche-history, like Salt: A World History or Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. I threw a legitimate tantrum a few weeks before my college thesis was due because I realized that writing about all-homosexual beauty pageants in the Byzantine Empire would have been just as obscure and stupid, but much, much easier.

But it’s that time again where I feel my creative-fertility clock ticking and want to start something for real. To get things going, I was making a mental list of books that have influenced me, and under the “scary” category was Forever by Judy Blume, which I read as a seven-year-old and then instantly decided that I was going to be repelled by sex forever.

This book, like all of Judy Blume’s, has been banned repeatedly for its frank discussion of teenage sexuality. It’s technically about a girl losing her virginity while in a relationship she thinks is “forever” (she actually ends up being the one who moves on)–but really, it’s about how fucking gross it is to name your penis Ralph. That’s what her boyfriend does. He names it Ralph. Ever since this book was published in 1975, the name Ralph has fallen completely off the radar. No young person wants to look at her child and think about this:

‘Don’t,’ he said, wiggling out of his pajama bottoms. He led my hand to his penis. ‘Katherine . . . I’d like you to meet Ralph . . . Ralph, this is Katherine. She’s a very good friend of mine.’

Then later, after he comes and it gets on her: ‘That’s all right . . . I don’t mind . . .’ I pulled out some tissues.

He took the box back. ‘I’m glad,’ he said, wiping up his stomach. I kissed the mole on the side of his face. ‘Did I do okay . . . considering my lack of experience?’

He laughed, then just put his arms around me. ‘You did just fine . . . Ralph liked it a lot.’

Sick nasty. Which brings me to my newest book idea: a compendium of the most awkward and gross sex scenes in literature. Which is to say, pretty much all of them.

Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding

I read Bridget Jones’s Diary for the first time in middle school, and I didn’t really get the point. It was one of the first chick lit books I ever read–which is appropriate, because I think Bridget Jones was anyway one of the first and best examples of self-consciously written, brand-namey, contemporary chick lit. Although, not being much older than the book itself, I could be completely wrong. And I don’t count Candace Bushnell because I think she’s horrible.

Anyway, at the time I was just happy to find an easy book that mentioned skirts and sex and dinner parties and also made me laugh. I dismissed it as a little bit silly, because Bridget does run on endlessly about personal neuroses that as a seventh grader I had already moved securely past. Or thought I had.

 A few things caught my eye this time around. One, Bridget Jones has severely disordered eating. She weighs herself to the ounce and berates herself for each calorie every goddamn day. Sure, she overeats more often than not (reading the entry when she drank 32 smoothies in a day, I started really craving smoothies and got horribly distracted thinking about soy milk), and it’s funny at times–”Have reached point where believe nutritional ideal is to eat nothing at all and that the only reason people eat is because they are so greedy that they cannot stop themselves from ruining their diets”–and Helen Fielding is remarking upon a very common female problem. But I kept thinking, even with Mr. Darcy in the bag, her life is going to suck until she stops doing this. I counted calories for two weeks my third year of college and started feeling guilty for eating fruit. Fuck that! And on a similar note, after being reminded four times per page that Bridget weighs 125 pounds, I started to wonder why they made such a point to make Renee Zellweger chubby in the movie.

But then I realized–okay, Bridget is in her mid-thirties and berated on a daily basis for being chronically single. And as much as I am repulsed by the idea of being a jobless housewife whose only currencies of her own are gossip and breast milk, I don’t ever want to hear anyone say anything along the lines of “Jia hasn’t had a boyfriend since she was thirty-three.” Jesus, maybe I’d weigh myself every day too. Who knows? What I could not have seen in seventh grade was how flatly intelligent Helen Fielding was about the facts of living in a world where, when women can have it all, they are also relentlessly judged, most of all by themselves, if they don’t.

 However, the best parts of the book this time were these few sentences, hands down. At an installation at the Saatchi Gallery, a young hipster says, “It’s, like, a sullied Utopia with these really really really good echoes of, like, lost national identities.” Then at a book launch, when Bridget talks about how she likes Blind Date, Mark Darcy tells her she’s a “top postmodernist,” and his girlfriend gets hilariously jackass-y about the “arrogant individualism which imagines that each generation can somehow create the world afresh,” and then says, “I’m not talking about a ventilating deconstructionalistic freshness of vision, I’m talking about the ultimate vandalization of the cultural framework.”

What–that’s the funniest thing I’ve read in months. I thought about all the papers I wrote in college that sounded exactly like that and then I realized why Bridget Jones is brilliant. Enrich the mind all you wish, unpack your social structure and analyze it as best you can. But at the end of the day if you’re hungover and feeling gross and unloved, those are the facts of your life, and what else can you do but write about it and hope to move on tomorrow.

The Man of My Dreams, by Curtis Sittenfeld

This one doesn’t get much press, does it? No one’s comparing it to Catcher in the Rye, like so many reviewers did with Prep–for real, that makes no sense to me–and there’s no intrigue like there is with American Wife and all its descriptions of what Laura Bush feels like while having sex with George Bush. Maybe it’s that this frog over here is less catchy than the ribbon belt. But, I both like and am also very interested in this middle child of a novel. In context of Sittenfeld’s somewhat singular place as a respected, best-selling chick-lit author, in context of the fact that she is able to give complete integrity and dignity to all of the people in said chick-lit books (which is rare indeed: think about all the status-hungry, eww-B&T stuff propagated by Lauren Weisberger and Candace Bushnell)–this book is interesting.

Because The Man of My Dreams, like Prep, is another coming-of-age story of a plain, nice, observant girl. But this time she tells Hannah’s life story through men rather than school years. The entire novel consists of anecdotes, spaced years apart, detailing every time Hannah has a significant encounter with a guy and showing her methodical attempts to understand herself in terms of these encounters and relationships. It’s a little bit unremarkable, for sure, but I was unnerved by the fact that it works. You do understand Hannah by the end, and very well.

And so what is Curtis Sittenfeld doing here? Is she calling girls of today out on the sad but common habit of defining yourself by whoever you’re with? Is she, with her limitless compassion, not calling anyone out at all but rather pointing out that understanding yourself in this way makes sense–just as understanding yourself by any changing constant, such as your restaurants or jobs or exercise rituals du jour, can also make sense? Curtis Sittenfeld’s most notable trait as a writer is the way that she accepts and states, without question and with a flat empathy, the fact that everyone is embarrassing and needy on the inside. But by writing this book this way, she puts into question whether we are needy because we do things like define ourselves solely through other people, or if it works the other way around. I’m interested.

Summer Sisters, by Judy Blume

First of all, Judy Blume is one of the most unintentionally hilarious entities ever, do you know what I mean? Maybe because of the age at which everyone reads her, or the fact that her subject matter grows dated in the funniest way possible: I remember being disgusted as a fourth-grader reading Judy Blume’s careful, tender description of having to attach a “sanitary napkin” to a belt in Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, and vowing at that ripe age of eight that I would always use tampons.

Then there’s the weird love she has for euphemisms. In (the terrible book) Forever, the young couple trying very hard to lose their virginities together decide that they are going to call his penis “Ralph“–of all the names, really–as to spare themselves the embarrassment of saying anything more sexual. This crops up in Summer Sisters as well: Caitlin and Vix call their own sexual arousal the “Power,” always with a capital P. These euphemisms are hilarious and kind of adorable, but in a gross way. Because while dear Judy is clearly trying to capture the shyness that all of her readers felt or feel about sex, I really find that sort of shyness pretty gross.

Summer Sisters is one of her few “adult” books, a distinction which makes no sense to me–it’s not written with any more sophistication or even any more big words. I guess the sex is “adult,” because it’s being had by adults–and it’s casual, which I suppose is inappropriate for children to read about or whatever. But like all of Judy Blume’s books, it’s super prurient and Lifetimey, and this one in particular has the pre-nostalgic emotional tinge of some of the worse scenes in Coyote Ugly or Center Stage. You be the judge of whether or not that sounds appealing.

Confessions of a Shopaholic, by Sophie Kinsella

I’m going to go ahead and say that I love this book. I read it for the first time in eighth grade, when I hadn’t really heard of chick-lit, and it was like the first time you watch an America’s Next Top Model marathon and realize: oh my God, I actually don’t have to think; I can actually just totally vacate my head and let all the pretty colors and good bone structure mesmerize me into forgetting that I haven’t showered in three days. There are a bunch of these consumer-porn Shopaholic books, all starring Becky Bloomwood, who is a lovably delusional Bridget Jonesy type. I hate to admit it, but I’ve read them all. Here is a rundown of what is good and what is not:

Confessions of a Shopaholic: the first one. Good, airy, funny, and with real-person problems. Shopaholic Takes Manhattan: edging into ridiculous territory, like ten-thousand dollar spending sprees. Shopaholic Ties the Knot: makes the move into wedding-consumer-porn. Shopaholic and Sister: meh. Shopaholic and Baby: so ridiculous that I thought, and still kind of think, that it was ghostwritten.

I think what really interests me about these books is that they’re so shamelessly lighthearted despite the fact that their entire success rests on tapping into an incredibly shallow lady-of-leisure fantasy in their readers. But maybe allowing myself to indulge my inner girl-brat through these books is one of the things that has kept me so aggressively anti-materialistic in real life.

Case in point, though: I found Shopaholic Takes Manhattan on my bookshelf just now and opened it to a random page. “But oh God. Oh God. That Vera Wang dress. Inky purple, with a low back and glittering straps. It just looked so completely movie-star perfect. Everyone crowded round to see me in it–and when I drew back the curtain, they all gasped.”

Gossip Girl, by Cecily von Ziegesar

With my low-level anxiety about Hilary Duff becoming a regular on Gossip Girl (yuck but true: she’s going to be Vanessa’s roommate), Leighton Meester all over “Good Girls Go Bad,” and tabloid coverage of whether Chuck is getting fat or not, sometimes I forget that the whole headbandy jumpsuity gloss-fest television series was spawned from this series. I used to read them on cheerleading trips in high school as sort of a shallowness insurance–I could never resent anyone around me while reading books in which every other sentence mentions a brand name, a dollar amount, Jenny’s double-D’s, or someone losing their virginity. The show is definitely better, but the books are way more ridiculous (but still unworthy of being acknowledged separately). For example, in the books, Vanessa has a shaved head, Jenny has an embarrassingly large chest, Dan moonlights as the lead singer in a rock band, Blair moves in with Vanessa and learns how to make tempeh lasagna, Dan and Vanessa have tantric sex on their Brooklyn rooftops, Nate hooks up with trashy Virginia Slims-smoking girls in the Hamptons–etc.

I don’t know what I did with these books, because I could only find one on my bookshelf. Still, I opened it to a random page and I leave you with this as a sample of the insanity:

“Nate began to cry as soon as it was over. The Viagra had worn off just in time. Serena let her head fall back, closing her enormous dark blue eyes as Nate pressed his soggy cheek into her hair. It was sweet and sort of feminine of him to cry after they’d done it, and she suddenly realized she was the stronger, more masculine one in their relationship. At least they’d finally done it. Now they were authentically a couple.”

Something Borrowed/Something Blue, by Emily Giffin

Yes, these are two different books, but not really. Emily Giffin is not quite as bad as Lauren Weisberger–whose The Devil Wears Prada and Everyone Worth Knowing, etc. feel like they are the exact same book with a day’s worth of search-and-replace work done on Word: fashion replaced with PR, green eyes replaced with blue, four-inch heels replaced with five–but still. To think of these books as two separate things would be teetering on the edge of the chick-lit black hole of thinking, where all of this stuff is told with such melodrama that it seems like an important life lesson, which it is not. Because both of these books tell the same story: two best friends, gorgeous bitchy Darcy and smart plain Rachel, get in a fight because Rachel steals Darcy’s fiance. Something Borrowed is from Rachel’s perspective, Something Blue from Darcy’s.

But putting aside my irritation that 700 pages of best-seller space has to be devoted to a plot where you must be constantly reminded of exactly how long everyone’s hair is, these books are definitely not bad. In the way that I’ve started watching Make It or Break It on ABC Family, this is terribly relaxing bullshit. Emily Giffin is a fluid, easy, precise writer, and she has it out for good in the end–she’s not so much into glamourous Manhattan lifestyles as a lot of other chick-lit writers are. And although I feel the same way about books like this as I do about ice cream–I only enjoy both things at the beach–if you like ice cream all the time then you’ll love this, or the equivalent metaphor.

American Wife, by Curtis Sittenfeld

This book is a good guilty pleasure for anyone, and I say guilty not because it’s bad, because it’s not: I think Curtis Sittenfeld is a great writer. She’s small-minded in a nice way, at her best when articulating the mundane, embarrassing, otherwise-unnoticed aspects of her characters’ decision-making–and this book is a guilty pleasure only because I couldn’t believe I was so enthralled by these minute, slightly boring details of Laura Bush’s (“Alice Lindgren’s”) life. Turns out sometimes you do want to know if she ate the curly fries on her fourth date with George W. (or Charlie Blackwell, as he’s called here). She avoids pitfalls: it’s not either reverent nor disrespectful to Laura Bush, nor does it seem fabricated at all, or cheesy. But she taps into something great about our tabloid sensibilities, satisfying the desire to know what W. was like in the bedroom (great) and to confirm the First Lady facelift (confirmed). Last night I watched an episode of Modern Marvels about the history of ice cream, and it felt like reading this book. Good for the summer, for sure.