Women's Lit: Chick Lit Gets an Update

In the opening scene of Amy Sohn's Prospect Park West, Rebecca, a Park Slope mother, masturbates to a Roman Polanski film while her baby naps. When the batteries in her vibrator die, she has to make “a Sophie's choice,” her orgasm or her daughter's sleep. She replaces the batteries with the ones from her daughter's mobile—and the child promptly wakes up crying.

In Paula Froelich's Mercury in Retrograde, three women become unlikely friends in a downtown Manhattan tenement: Penelope, a newspaper reporter who has quit her job after being passed over for a promotion; Lena “Lipstick” Lippencrass, a socialite and editor at Y magazine, who's been cut her off by her parents; and Dana, a divorced lawyer perpetually struggling to lose 20 pounds.

In the rarefied Upper East Side confines of Gigi Levangie Grazer's Queen TakesKing, real estate titan Jackson Powers shows up late to his own 25th anniversary party after a meeting with his mistress, a young, blonde morning show host. The next day he awakens to pictures of him and his lover in the New York Post. His wife, Cynthia, demands a divorce and reflects on “a career as a ballerina that ended not with injury, but with maternity.”

Welcome to the new narrative of the New York woman—just don't call it chick lit. If these three recent books are any indication, the genre is about to get an update. “The Prince Charming narrative is just not accurate to people's lives,” Sohn says. “There's so much anxiety around finding a mate that no one really thinks about the actual marriage when they're trying to find someone.” Froelich concurs, with a twist,“None of my friends are about, 'I must get married,' ” she says over lunch. “They're about, 'I want to stand on my own two feet.' ”

Indeed, for much of this genre's history, the story of the New York woman was defined by novels like Rona Jaffe's 1958 The Best of Everything and Mary McCarthy's The Group (1963), in which young, educated women try to make their way in Manhattan but always with the specter of men and marriage shadowing them. Fast forward to the 1990s and Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City, and many of the anxieties and preoccupations of single New York women hadn't changed much. Carrie Bradshaw and her peers' views of marriage were conflicted—they saw getting married as ruining their fun. Despite her professed aversion to marriage, however, Carrie longs for a companion. And in the Sex and the City movie, the final chapter of the popular series, when “Mr. Big” finally proposes, Carrie accepts eagerly.

Sohn, Froelich and Grazer are eager to move beyond the idea that for today's New York woman, getting the man is the key to happiness, instead choosing to portray women's lives as complicated—from career problems to loveless marriages and divorce, and conflicted feelings about having children.

After “Sex”

On a recent weekday morning, Sohn and I meet at a cafe in the heart of Park Slope, Brooklyn, where her novel Prospect Park West is set—a cafe, Sohn says, she chose for a reason—it is across the street from a popular public school, and mothers congregate there after dropping their kids off. “In this neighborhood, parenthood is in your face, on display, all the time,” she says. “It's a very undersexed neighborhood.”

Prospect Park West follows the intersecting lives of four Park Slope couples, all of whom have children. Rebecca and Theo haven't had sex in a year and a half; Karen and Matty only have sex when she's determined that she's likely to get pregnant; Melora and Stuart only start having sex after he has an affair; and Lizzie and Jay's sex life is complicated by the fact that she would rather be having sex with women—specifically, with Rebecca, with whom she shares a kiss after a night of drinking, leading to an obsession. To be published in September, Prospect Park West has already been optioned by Sarah Jessica Parker's production company, Pretty Matches, for an HBO series.

If the book's narrative has an authentic, true-life feel, perhaps it's because Sohn, 35, moved to Park Slope with her husband in 2004. They have a four-year-old daughter. The author of two previous novels, Run Catch Kiss and My Old Man, Sohn, who grew up in Brooklyn Heights and began her career as a sex and relationships columnist for the New York Press, portrays Park Slope as a kind of new suburbia, both in terms of outlook and geography.

“Park Slope has a reputation for being hippieish and sanctimonious,” she observes. “There's the stereotype that [Park Slope women] are all earth mothers, eat organic food, and that they're helicoptery,” a vision of motherhood played out to logical extremes in Prospect Park West: Karen forces her four-year-old son, Darby, to wear knee pads at the playground; Lizzie worries that having one glass of wine will affect her breast milk.

Real estate, meanwhile, a culture all its own in New York “that thrives on upselling everyone,” Sohn says, serves as a compelling nexus of conflict in the book, inextricably tied up with anxieties about sex and success. “The book is really about the perils of aspiration,” Sohn says, a culture she calls “the wanties,” those for whom life is “always about the next thing, trading up.”

In one telling scene, Karen and Matty are having sex, but he can't climax. While he masturbates, Karen thinks about a bid they recently put in for a three-bedroom co-op. She imagines Matty's sperm as “millions of hungry apartment hunters all bidding against each other for a mint 3BR with DFPS, SS appliances, and a WD on a pk blk.” If Matty could just put aside his financial anxiety, she muses, “one of those millions of apartment hunters could break out of the throng into the warm waiting floor-through, and find a way to make himself at home.”

The women in Froelich's novel, Mercury in Retrograde, meanwhile, are equally complex—although they have preoccupations other than playground ethics and the food co-op.

“They all go through something traumatic to make them change,” Froelich says of her characters. “For Lipstick, it is money—she's living off her parents until she finally understands that there's strings attached. She doesn't have control—she has to take it back.” When Lipstick finally moves into her own apartment, she reflects: “It's all been so humiliating and stressful to realize I was just their puppet. To be honest, I have no idea what I'm going to do about anything.” But forced to improvise after her credit cards are cut off, she discovers a talent for fashion design.

Another character, Dana, only finds happiness postdivorce when she realizes that she had transposed all the energy she had put into her marriage into her job and still wasn't finding true happiness. And Penelope—who bears a resemblance to Froelich herself—delves into the delicate dynamics among women in the workplace. After she quits her job, she lands at a local cable news channel as an assistant, where she distinguishes herself by being the first woman to stand up to a chauvinistic news anchor known for sexually harassing his co-workers.

Penelope also embodies the trope of the wide-eyed Midwesterner coming to the big city and finding that life there isn't exactly what she bargained for. “New York is the most romantic city there is,” says Froelich, 35, of the allure of writing about New York women. “If you make it here, you can do anything.” Rather than waiting for Mr. Right, Froelich's characters, she explains, come to realize that they don't really want what they once thought they did—and really knowing what you want comes through independence.

“This whole category of chick lit—I think people like to categorize because it makes life easier for people in general,” says Greer Hendricks, Froelich's editor, a senior editor at Atria Books, who also edits bestselling author Jennifer Weiner. “For some authors it's fantastic—they're being instantly identified with a certain kind of book. For other authors it's a disservice, because they're really writing women's stories, but because people like to generalize and categorize, it's labeled chick lit. I think it can be both a blessing and a curse.”

“We all write about what we know,” Froelich says over lunch at the Evergreen Diner on West 47th Street, around the corner from her office at the New York Post, where she wrote for the newspaper's famous “Page Six” gossip column for nearly a decade. A couple of weeks after our lunch, Froelich announced she was leaving the paper. “To have real empathy, you have to live it,” she says—although she insists that all her characters are composites. She is now working on a sequel to Mercury in Retrograde.

“Paula is writing about these women where it wasn't just about getting the guy,” notes Hendricks. “These women were really getting a life. It's really about friendship and self-acceptance and getting your act together. It's about the life, not the guy,” a sentiment embodied by Penelope. “Penelope has a strange optimism,” Froelich writes. “While events didn't always seem to go her way, at least they were moving forward—or backwards or sideways. Either way, they were still moving.”

Women's Lit

In the more upscale world of Gigi Levangie Grazer's New York, one of Park Avenue penthouses and private jets, life is no less complicated. In Queen Takes King, 45-year-old Cynthia has to cope with the fallout from her decision to divorce her husband of 25 years, the megarich developer Jackson “Jacks” Powers, after she finds out he's having an affair with a 30-year-old morning show anchor named Lara Sizemore. Then she discovers that being on her own gives her an identity she never realized she had. The author of such books as Maneater and The Starter Wife, Grazer, 46, finalized her own divorce from her husband of nine years, the also megarich Hollywood producer Brian Grazer, in May.

“It seems like [Cynthia] has everything, but she gave up everything for Jacks,” says Grazer over coffee at a small cafe near her hotel in Soho; she was visiting New York for a few days while her two young sons were with their father in Hawaii. “She's in her 40s and forced to get a divorce, not knowing who she is or what she's made of. Cynthia has to learn to grow up.” It's a tale that rings true for Grazer. “Now that I'm in my 40s, I see the fallout of marriages—drug abuse, divorces, affairs,” she says. “I was getting divorced—and even though I was in a different situation financially, I saw women get screwed, being taken care of by their children. Didn't Gloria Steinem say, be the man you want to marry?”

But things aren't so easy for the young girlfriend, Lara, either. In one scene, she finds herself taking a bubble bath in a bikini for a live segment on her show. “I wanted someone who's frustrated that she has to be in a bikini and bubbles,” Grazer says. “I don't think characters should be easy to figure out. I can't read anything simplistic.”

For Grazer, Queen Takes King is her first novel to take place in New York, after three set in Los Angeles. But she found that writing about power, money and sex in New York was not wholly different from writing about power, money and sex in Los Angeles. “Donald Trump is Louis B. Mayer,” she says, referring to the Hollywood mogul who built the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studio in the first half of the 20th century.

Like Mayer and Trump, in Queen Takes King, Jacks Powers is a larger-than-life character who's fond of splashing his name on buildings all over the city; though he's had many affairs throughout his marriage, it isn't until he meets Lara that he actually falls in love again—a story line Grazer intentionally complicates by making Lara a complex, sympathetic character. “I like it when characters don't have easy answers,” Grazer says. “I wanted to make [Lara] sort of confusing. Jackson's the girl in the relationship—she's allowed to be the alpha.”

Grazer then has a question for me: “You wouldn't call my book chick lit, right?” she asks.

“Let's call it women's literature,” I suggest.

“That's right!” she replies. “It's dark but maybe now we're allowed to be who we really are, which is complicated. The idea that having the right bag buys you happiness—now that's dark.”