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| Interview with Jenny Colgan by Lorna Russell ‘NO OFFENCE to you, but I think that’s bollocks,’ snaps Jenny Colgan, when I ask if she’d like to write a literary novel instead of the chick lit she’s famous for. Perhaps it wasn’t a very delicate question to ask someone who’s well-known for defending the genre from its detractors. And chick lit has had plenty of those in recent years, most famously Beryl Bainbridge, who called it ‘froth’. Colgan doesn’t care. In fact, it probably did her career good. ‘It was quite funny because it was an opportunity for me. I got asked to do a lot of things afterwards.’ Colgan’s first book, Amanda’s Wedding, was published in 1998, when the term chick lit hadn’t even been coined. When she was still working for the NHS she remembers reading Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones column in the Independent. Before the quintessential chick lit novel was written, this weekly dose of twentysomething angst made her and her friends ‘pee ourselves laughing’. When she began work on her own début novel, all she wanted to do was ‘write books and find a receptive audience’. Then, suddenly, ‘chick lit went from a term that hadn’t been coined yet, to a term that described every single work of fiction by a woman between the ages of 25 and 45!’ Chick lit suffers from a reputation of being lightweight, badly written and obsessed with rather trivial topics (getting married, being thin, drinking too much, getting married…). But, as an exasperated Colgan points out, there is good and bad in every genre. ‘Tons of the chick lit stuff is crap but masses of crime writing is crap too, and Martin Amis’ last book was crap!’ For the whole interview, read Issue 21 » Subscribe! Go to » Jenny Colgan's Method |
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For more on JENNY COLGAN, go to www.jennycolgan.com
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