Praising Chick Lit

I read your last book," a female acquaintance confided at a party recently. "Really?" I said casually, idly hoping for some complimentary comment.

"I was surprised at how good it was," she concluded goodnaturedly. I tried to cover my slight annoyance with a smile. "I don't normally read that sort of thing," she went on with sledgehammer sensitivity. "But yes," she mused as she sipped her Pimm's, "I thought it was really quite good."

The woman wasn't being deliberately impertinent - her amazement was genuine; but I've long since got used to such remarks. For if you write the kind of contemporary women's fiction I do - light, commercial and prettily packaged - the assumption is that it can't be much cop. Barely a week goes by without some sneering reference to chick-lit which has become all but a term of abuse.

Why this should be is not clear - simple envy, perhaps, at our huge sales and concomitantly large advances. Or the belief that because these books are easy to read, they're easy to write. They're not. But I think there is something much deeper at work: a snobbish distaste for popular writing full stop.

It is as though there is this wondrous thing called "literary fiction" that is pure and untainted (however dreary), against which all massmarket fiction is set. When people ask me what sort of books I write, I reply that they are romantic comedies about self-deceiving women - women who fail to acknowledge the mess they're making of things - because that's precisely what they are.

Whoever wants to call them " chicklit" - which is no more than a marketing label - can do so, I really don't mind. Those who dismiss the genre wholesale fail to recognise that a lot of chick-lit is good. Many of the best are very well written. Take the opening of Claire Calman's Love is a Four Letter Word, for example: "She sees herself fall in slow motion, the toe of her shoe catching on the edge of the paving-stone, her arm reaching out in front of her, her hand a pale shape like a leaf against the sky."

Or Ralph's Party by Lisa Jewell: "The girl standing in the doorway was tiny, about 5ft 2in, black curly hair held on top of her head with pins and clips in some complicated but very feminine style that looked as if it should have sported ivy wreaths ..."

The better chick-lit novels are also well executed: they are witty, polished comedies, that have come far from Bridget Jones. For chick-lit no longer reflects the self - absorbed, Chardonnay --fuelled lives of the man-less, c a lor ie --counting, thirty-something. The genre has morphed into something else.

There is a myriad of subgenres - henlit for the over-35s (Jane Green); mum-lit for the child-encumbered (Allison Pearson); lad-lit for single men (Nick Hornby) and dad-lit for fathers (Mike Gayle). These are not trivial distinctions.

Many of the books address serious issues. Anna Maxted's wonderful debut, Getting Over It, is a fictional expatiation upon bereavement, as is Calman's Love is a Four Letter Word. Drug dependency runs through Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes; and in Maxted's Behaving Like Adults there is a brutal rape. Lisa Jewell explores the darker side of step-relationships in Thirtynothing, while I wrote about adoption and child abandonment in Rescuing Rose.