Alarmed--and outraged!--I fired up my trusty search engine, determined to prove my agent wrong. To my utter astonishment and consternation, all the mentions of "hen lit" and "matron lit" (gee, why not "fiction about intelligent, interesting women of a certain age"?) that 
were there just a few months ago, are indeed now missing. And imprints created expressly for the purpose of publishing novels with more mature heroines have closed up shop. It's like someone flipped a switch and said, "Old girls ba-a-a-a-a-d; young girls goo-oo-oo-d!" (If you've read Animal Farm, that comment will be a lot funnier. And if you haven't, you must. Find it/order it/buy it today!)
Not that it'll do any good, but I must protest! Since when did Youth corner the market on compelling fiction? Who decided tramp stamps and college loans trump carpools and midlife crises? We should have seen this coming when Disney announced their plans to publish Miley Cyrus' memoir. Am I the only one
who thinks a 15-year-old writing about her life experience is high comedy? The child's barely been on the planet long enough to make a carbon footprint, much less acquire sufficient material for a memoir! Why don't we just go ahead and lower the age requirement for president while we're at it? Maybe young Chelsea could do what old Hillary couldn't!
We've come to expect short-sightedness from television (witness the current glut of reality shows--a phenomenon that started long before the writers' strike), but to think the literary world would succumb to a lack of vision--not to mention abject discrimination--is truly disturbing. I liked Bridget Jones Diary as much as the next person, but please don't make that the watermark for all my reading yet to come! What loss to have never known Clyde Edgerton's Mattie Rigsbee, Louisa May Alcott's Marmee, Virginia Woo
lf's Clarissa Dalloway, Muriel Sparks' Jean Brodie, or Janet Evanovich's Grandma Mazur! What deprivation to think that, from this point forward, our fictional viewpoints might be restricted to that of people whose formative years never knew Herman's Hermits, Chatty Kathy, Whip 'n' Chill, cheap gas, or life without cell phones!
were there just a few months ago, are indeed now missing. And imprints created expressly for the purpose of publishing novels with more mature heroines have closed up shop. It's like someone flipped a switch and said, "Old girls ba-a-a-a-a-d; young girls goo-oo-oo-d!" (If you've read Animal Farm, that comment will be a lot funnier. And if you haven't, you must. Find it/order it/buy it today!)Not that it'll do any good, but I must protest! Since when did Youth corner the market on compelling fiction? Who decided tramp stamps and college loans trump carpools and midlife crises? We should have seen this coming when Disney announced their plans to publish Miley Cyrus' memoir. Am I the only one
who thinks a 15-year-old writing about her life experience is high comedy? The child's barely been on the planet long enough to make a carbon footprint, much less acquire sufficient material for a memoir! Why don't we just go ahead and lower the age requirement for president while we're at it? Maybe young Chelsea could do what old Hillary couldn't!We've come to expect short-sightedness from television (witness the current glut of reality shows--a phenomenon that started long before the writers' strike), but to think the literary world would succumb to a lack of vision--not to mention abject discrimination--is truly disturbing. I liked Bridget Jones Diary as much as the next person, but please don't make that the watermark for all my reading yet to come! What loss to have never known Clyde Edgerton's Mattie Rigsbee, Louisa May Alcott's Marmee, Virginia Woo
lf's Clarissa Dalloway, Muriel Sparks' Jean Brodie, or Janet Evanovich's Grandma Mazur! What deprivation to think that, from this point forward, our fictional viewpoints might be restricted to that of people whose formative years never knew Herman's Hermits, Chatty Kathy, Whip 'n' Chill, cheap gas, or life without cell phones! Hopefully, my agent is wrong. Hopefully, this post will pull comments from editors claiming "Au contraire! We'd love to see novels featuring 'seasoned' women!" Hopefully, I'll hear from book-buying readers clamoring, "Give us your tried, your true! Your middle-aged mamas living life to the fullest!" Because, frankly, the fifty-year-olds I know are a lot more interesting than the thirty-year-olds I know, the eighty-year-olds are downright darling, and how many times do you really want to read another account of Gen X angst?
Please, somebody send me proof that the stars of my novel-in-progress don't have to give up their senior discount to stay in the literary game!
P.S. Diane Lawrence has a funny blog here that explores this same subject from a slightly different perspective, and Mary Hirsch's assertion that Size 18 is the new Size 6 deserves a whole blog entry to itself!
P.S. Diane Lawrence has a funny blog here that explores this same subject from a slightly different perspective, and Mary Hirsch's assertion that Size 18 is the new Size 6 deserves a whole blog entry to itself!
