Desi Chick Lit

The newly popular fiction genre--chick lit--has a sub-section filled with emerging south-asian authors. These women span the spectrum from ultra-conservative to crunchy hippies in their musings on life and love.

I had two such books thrust upon me by a former colleauge from my law firm recruitment days (just a year ago but feels like a lifetime). We had lunch at Chipotle on friday and afterwards I escorted her back to her office where she pilfered an academic desk calendar for me from supplies and handed me a stack of paperbacks. She sure reads a fair amount of chick-lit given the five books she unloaded on me. For a Peruvian immigrant who attended Columbia University, she has a penchant for south-asian fiction or perhaps she is just a voracious reader given her hour-long daily commute from Forrest Hills to Grand Central.

I sped read through the first entitled "Invisible Lives" belittling the rudimentary writing style and bemoaning the sari metaphor but devouring the plot. I'm looking forward to an evening of "Goddess for Hire" which I can only hope swings some style into the typically overdone topography. Like Bollywood films, south-asian authors tend to overflow with wordy interludes instead of creating snarky dialogue.

Part of my gripe lies in my inability to create such a convoluted yet formulaic tale of my own. It seems that despite my basic writing style, I could easily craft a piece that would match the level of fetishized easterness required to get such a novel published. Yet my ideas never make their way to paper and I sit here sans manuscript complaining about women who, if nothing else, had the dedication to write a whole damn story out of the ideas rattling in their heads.