Writing for Shop Girls (2004)

At a recent readers’ day in Dublin, best selling author Lesley Pearse told the audience how a rather snide woman from Bath had once asked her ‘Darling, do you write for shop girls?’ It made the audience laugh loudly, myself included; but it also got me thinking - what’s wrong with writing for shop girls? Shop girls, bank girls, library girls, restaurant girls . . . in fact girls in general?

In Ireland, as in other countries, there is a distinct fiction hierarchy. At the top of the pile is literary fiction; you know the type of books - the ones book clubs around the country usually pick, the Booker winners and the Impac nominees. Fine and worthy books, many brilliant reads like Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides among their ranks. Next is the slightly murkier (but significantly more lucrative) middle ground - the Anita Shreves, Tracy Chevaliers and Joanne Harrises of the literary scene. Crime novels snuggle in just about here - too ‘genre’ to move up the ranks, too well respected (in most cases quite rightly) to snake down, with authors like James Lee Burke, Julie Parsons and John Connolly producing atmospheric and highly readable books.

And finally on the very bottom rung of the ladder, along with genre books like science fiction and fantasy sit the myriad of books by talented women authors, myself included. No one is quite sure what to call ‘our’ books. What were referred to as sex and shopping novels or ‘glitz’ in the 80’s and early 90’s, morphed into ‘chick lit’ in the late 90’s and have now evolved into ‘hen lit’ (for older chicks you see). After a straw poll of my author friends we came up with quite a range of monikers - airport books, commercial fiction, popular fiction, modern romance, modern manners, contemporary women’s fiction  . . . the list goes on.

There has been a positive deluge of new Irish women authors in the last few years, and many of these have become hugely successful world wide, with Marian Keyes and Cathy Kelly leading the fray, in the wake of the Queen of Fiction herself, Maeve Binchy. Why have so many Irish women taken to the pen? No one is quite sure. A new era of self-confident young women perhaps who want to write (and read) about women like themselves? A brash and bold Dublin-based publisher by the name of Poolbeg who had the vision, originally under the editorship of the late Kate Cruise O’Brien, to discover and publish the early talents? Long before Bridget Jones, we had our own Helen Fielding in the form of Patricia Scanlon, whose City Girls novels blazed a trail for Irish women’s fiction.

Irish women writers are uniquely tuned in to what their Irish readers want. And by tapping into modern Irish women’s needs with such empathy, they also tap into many universals - the search for a place in the word; the difficulties and joys of motherhood; the amazing support systems of female friends and family; modern relationships and how to navigate them; and in the case of the most recent headliner, PS I Love You, even coming to terms with the death of a loved one.

Irish women are voracious readers and most of them read up and down the literary ladder. They will read Colm MacCann’s Dancer for their Book Club; dip into Cold Mountain before they see the film; pick up Sheila O’Flanagan’s latest for the bus home; and stock up on more women authors for their summer holiday in Spain. In certain times in their lives - in the heady early days of a new baby in the house for example - they will find themselves drawn to character-driven books with a fast paced plot, their shot term memory shot from lack of sleep. At other stages they may need a good laugh in the form of Marian Keyes’ witty takes on modern life. Or need a bit of a comfort read in the form of Cathy Kelly’s warm, generous books. Horses for courses as they say.

There is nothing ‘clever’ about literary snobbery. As any real reader will tell you – the book’s the thing, not the genre it’s in. And the modern Irish women writers work hard at their craft. They look into their hearts and write not for themselves, not for the review pages of newspapers, not for the bookshops, but for their readers. Because to us, the readers are the most important people in the world, they are quite simply the people who make us writers.

So why are certain people still so disparaging about women’s writers? Why do they almost sniff when they refer to ‘women’s fiction’? After all, fiction is fiction and making thousands of people happy with a warm, generous, kind-hearted book can’t be bad, can it? 

So no more apologies. I’m saying it loud and saying it proud! I’m Sarah Webb and I write for shop girls.

(This piece first appeared in the Evening Herald, 2004)