Black chick lit grows up
Good New York Times article about black women writers.
June 27, 2005
Pioneers Are Taking Black Chick Lit Into Middle Age
By FELICIA R. LEE
Consider Marilyn Grimes, a wildly hormonal mother of three in a stale marriage, hiding in a toilet stall and weighing her options. Watch Barbara Bentley ponder having a fling because her Pratesi sheets and Jimmy Choo shoes can't compensate for a cheating husband. And check out preppie Aisha Branch McCovney, lolling in bed for three days with her dream man, although she's engaged to the scion of an old-money family.
These characters are from the new novels by Terry McMillan ("The Interruption of Everything"), Connie Briscoe ("Can't Get Enough") and Benilde Little ("Who Does She Think She Is?"). Often considered the midwives of black chick lit, these writers are all baby boomers who paved the way more than a decade ago for popular fiction featuring a world of black characters.
Now the writers (and many of those characters) have grown up - they got the man, had the kids and moved to the suburbs - but they are still pioneers.
What they are churning out now, after all, is not exactly chick lit, which is resolutely young, single and urban. Nor are they replicating the more familiar tales of middle-aged, middle-class American women trying to have it all in suburbia. Those women - in fiction, film and television - usually come in one shade; on ABC's "Desperate Housewives," for example, Wisteria Lane only recently welcomed its first black residents.
"Black women in the 40-plus range are virtually invisible in media," said the author Marita Golden, founder of the Hurston/Wright Foundation, which supports black writers.
That is what sets this generation of more seasoned black women writers apart.
"What we're seeing with these writers," said Patrik Henry Bass, books editor at Essence magazine, "is the maturation of the buppie."
Readers who loved Ms. McMillan's "Waiting to Exhale" (1992), about four upwardly mobile young women yearning for the right man, or Ms. Briscoe's "Sisters and Lovers" (1994), the tale of three sisters struggling with careers and families, are now intrigued by the triumphs and struggles of women like themselves, Mr. Bass said: a bit older, remarrying, juggling motherhood and a career.
"We're really the only place you're going to see black women of a certain age and a certain sort of history," said Ms. Little, whose "Who Does She Think She Is" (Free Press), her fourth book, tells the story of Aisha, 26; her divorced mother, Camille, 45; and her patrician grandmother, Geneva, 72. Aisha's engagement to a rich white man is a chance for the other two women to consider their lives and choices.
Telling the story in three voices, said Ms. Little, 46 and a mother of two, allowed her to explore the generation gaps between the characters and to look at the very different options available to black women as attitudes toward race and women's rights changed.
While these baby-boomer writers aren't above dropping brand names to make a point, their chick-lit sisters, Ms. Little said, seem to do so without providing much else by way of social context.
"The black chick-lit books that I've read, it's all about 'gotta find a man' and that's it," she said. "These characters just spring up, they don't have a background, they don't have parents, they don't have brother and sisters and concerns." She has used her novels (the others are "Good Hair," "The Itch" and "Acting Out") to explore issues like class divisions among blacks, buppie ennui and the juggling acts of even privileged wives and mothers. These issues are a far cry from slavery or the ghetto, which she said she was told in 1989 was what she had to write about to be published.
Ms. McMillan's blockbuster "Waiting to Exhale" is widely considered the wakeup call to publishers that readers craved stories about the lives of black women.
During the 90's, Mr. Bass said, black women writers like Pearl Cleage, Bebe Moore Campbell, Diane McKinney-Whetstone and Tina McElroy Ansa - all of whom have new or soon-to-be released books - benefited from Ms. McMillan's high profile and staked out their own territory. Their characters, too, reflect more mature lives affected by issues like remarriage and children, career struggles and troubled family members.
Ms. McMillan has sold 10 million books, and it is a measure of her success that 500,000 first copies of "The Interruption of Everything" (Viking), her sixth novel, which is due out in July, have been printed. In "Interruption," a suburban Californian, Marilyn Grimes, deals with life right before menopause, an annoying live-in mother-in-law, grown kids with their own problems, a husband in full midlife crisis, a mom who is becoming forgetful and a sister with a drug problem. Sigh.
Ms. McMillan, 53, said "Interruption" reflected some of the changes in her own life, which has included marriage and the quotidian trials of single motherhood. But, she said, a similar, complexly drawn black character was hard to find on television or in the movies.
"Despite the fact that everybody seemed to think I was this jetsetter," she said in an interview, "I took my son to school, I carpooled, I went to every little league soccer game, every play, everything. But the one thing that I noticed was how many women were the ones who sat there week after week, every practice, every game.
"And over the years I realized how much responsibility we have as women and as mothers and as wives."
So, she said, she wrote a book that asked, What's next "when you realize that you've done all you can but it's mostly for everybody else?"
She might have helped chick lit to be born, but Ms. McMillan says she does not believe that its man-chasing focus reflects where she is in life. She even passionately hates the term "chick lit," calling it a cheap shot, "because most women writers write about the heart and matters of the heart, and that can encompass a lot of things."
Ms. McMillan acknowledged that she helped opened the doors for many young black writers. Her concern now is that too many publishers have used her phenomenal sales as a yardstick to judge emerging writers, asking them to write stories like "Exhale." This hinders them, she said, from developing their own style and stories, and their books are too often poorly marketed and edited in the rush to get them out there.
One solution, she said, is for publishers and critics to stop obsessively pigeonholing writers and to let readers enjoy their stories.
"Most every concern and issue and problem that every human being has, for the most part, is universal, particularly in this day and age," she said.
Ms. Briscoe, though, says we live in a culture so smitten with youth that one of her fans at a recent reading was shocked to learn that Barbara Bentley, wife of the philandering millionaire in "Can't Get Enough" (Doubleday), was 50. "I was like, yeah, she's 50," said Ms. Briscoe, who is 52. "We have lives, too."
But then, she said, she was approached at the reading by a young woman in her 20's or 30's who said she was tired of novels about singles and sex.
Ms. Briscoe's first two books, "Sisters and Lovers" and "Big Girls Don't Cry" (1996), were mostly about women in their 20's and 30's seeking men, taking care of children, climbing the corporate ladder and even steeping themselves in 1970's-style campus politics. It was all fresh material back then. Her latest novel, a sequel to "P.G. County" (2002), is her way of poking at the material obsessions of some members of the African-American upper crust, as well as showcasing mature women with sex lives. For good measure, she throws in some teenagers and a good-hearted working woman, too.
She looks forward, she said, to having more non-black readers discover the worlds created by black writers, especially given the current noise about desperate housewives and mommy wars.
"We're not writing about issues of racism all the time or exclusively about racism or poverty," she said. "We're writing about general issues that affect women of all ages."
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