Carrie vs. The Wakefields

I hate it when people knock on chick-lit.

Though they are fluffy and wispy and whiny and pink, they also contain words and stories and drama and women protagonists.

See here, I like some solid Pulitzer prize-winning Junot Diaz or some morbid Bret Easton Ellis or some tart Nick Hornby or whatever else books you would call “deep” or “serious” as much as the next well-educated academic but sometimes, I just want to lounge by the pool with my bubblegum pink Meg Cabot, dammit!

But you know, even though I am loud and proud about my literary guilty pleasures, I must clarify that the chick-lit I read has to be well-written. I ain’t flipping through no Twilight here.

Take for instance two titles I recently finished. One is Sweet Valley Confidential, a where-are-they-now tale following the honey-hued Californian Wakefield twins of Francine Pascal’s Sweet Valley High series.

When I was in elementary-middle-ok, even high school, Sweet Valley consumed much of my book-reading times. I’m pretty sure I’ve read every single one of the 250+ Sweet Valley books. I followed Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield back to when they were kids, I trekked through the history of Lila Fowler’s ancestors, I gasped through the Super Thrillers, where the twins’ lives were in jeopardy far too much for normal people to handle, I was the ultimate Sweet Valley geek.

So I was delighted to hear that the 10-years-later novel came out earlier this year.

I had to read it.

No matter that I’ve forgotten most of the characters’ names and I’m 10 years older than the gang was in their prime.

Now that I’ve read it, I wish I could take those 8 hours back.

Maybe because over the last 10 years, I’ve gained many things like worldly experiences (I was in 7 countries over one year, you know), a college education and an inkling of an idea of how the real world works, I realized that the Sweet Valley books are really, really bad.

The characters are so selfish, self-absorbed and unsympathetic. The dialogue is HORRIBLE. I understand because Jessica Wakefield is from southern California and was a blonde cheerleader, she has to pepper her sentence with “like”s. But even when she’s 27? Like, seriously? And Ms. Pascal, our generation do, like, not use “like” weirdly in the middle, like, of sentences like like this like like like. And though the romantic teenager in me loved idealizing the story book life of the Sweet Valley characters, the 20-something me was bored out of my mind by all the happy endings. Perfect is boring.

I gave up hope on chick-lit for all of three days when along came The Carrie Diaries, Candace Bushnell’s much-anticipated Sex & The City prequel.

Now this is a chick-lit done right!

I think the most important virtue of the novel was that the narrator, Carrie Bradshaw, was a delightfully quippy, quirky girl who knows that even though what she has isn’t what high school covets, she’s going to stay that way anyway. Another thing I loved was something that was surprisingly lacking–sex. At least in Carrie’s life, anyway. She didn’t need it. She was having way too much fun without it. (And we all know she’s going to get plenty of action later on in life). Bushnell was able to satisfy lady fantasies everywhere by having different gorgeous boys vying for Carrie’s affections and drama galore but she was also able to touch on choice questions all women come to face with in life: Do I sacrifice my own opinions to make my mate happy? What do I do when my best friend’s betrayed me? It’s good stuff.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never quite fit in throughout my adolescence, whether it was because I was too tall, too dorky, too shy around boys, too flat-chested, too best-friendy, too independent to just follow the status quo, my heart drew near to Carrie because I related to her in so many ways. I cling onto the modern-day chick-lit fairy tale; that the underdog nerdy girl will cling onto her uniqueness until it turns her into an Emmy-winning sitcom creator and star and funniest woman in America. (Oops, that’s another book we’ll get to another day).

Let’s hope that fairytale becomes a reality for this underdog.

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posted by Janice | Comment: 2 | Books, Love, Uncategorized, Writing

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