Mum lit: a chore thing

The chick lit fans have all grown up, got married and started reading ‘mum lit’. Christina Hopkinson’s book about a housework-shy husband exemplifies the new genre The Pile of Stuff at the Bottom of the Stairs was snapped up by Hodder, after a bidding war that, according to press reports, resulted in a “six-figure sum” for two novels. Author Christina Hopkinson, who looks like a slightly cross version of Teri Polo from Meet the Parents , wrinkles her nose in distaste at the subject: “You’ve seen the piece in the Bookseller, right? Well, they’re right. What’s normally so irksome about those stories is when someone says: ‘I had a week off work, and I wrote three chapters, and got a deal on the strength of that.’ It sounds so effortless. But this was a complete book. It wasn’t effortless.” Anecdotes put the deal at a quarter of a million pounds, which is huge news. An industry that claims, always, to be in the doldrums, can still muster headying sums for “mum lit”. The reason this market holds such a fascination for publishers is that it is nothing like as saturated as that for chick lit, whose readers are growing up. The romantic tropes won’t serve for a whole lifetime in mainstream fiction. There needs to be a second chapter: post-happy-ever-after, pre-divorce. Plenty of authors would be happy, or at least not enraged, to place themselves in this genre – India Knight , Mink Elliott and the under-rated Fiona Gibson . But there is more to it than simply being a book by a woman, about a woman with a family. There is more, even, than the suggestion – floated by the Bookseller and echoed in the book’s cover design – that the publishers hope to have discovered the new Allison Pearson (whose first novel, I Don’t Know How She Does It has sold more than a million copies in the UK, and who also done well in the US). Hopkinson’s book was sold on its Big Idea: what’s the thing you hate most about the one you love? What makes your heart beat faster when you don’t want to have sex because you’re too tired? (Tidying; tidying and arguing.) That’s what makes this mum

Posted by on April 6, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.