Miss Popularity
Back at Simsbury High, in verdant Simsbury, Connecticut, Weiner "didn’t fit in, not at all." She was "always about five minutes from being shoved into a locker." Weiner was a smart girl, a Brain, an awkward student with quasi-punk (for Connecticut) hair, whose good grades and love of poetry got her admitted to Princeton, but who watched the popular girls and their friends cruise around in perfect pink Tretorns and feathered hair with a mix of disgust and outright envy. If there had been blogs back in ’87, Jennifer Weiner certainly would have had one that listed eight — maybe even 10 — reasons that popular girls should be kicked until they are dead.
AS IT IS, Weiner’s blog frequently covers "chick lit": What it is, what it isn’t, and why anyone should care. A compulsive writer who missed the "daily outlet" of newspapers, Weiner started SnarkSpot as an online diary, a place to keep her voice in working order, where readers could come to find out about signings and readings and, between books, to catch up on the ongoing novel that is Jennifer Weiner’s life: "I just remembered this funny hospital story," read an early post. "After they wheeled me into the room, a nurse came in and checked my chart. ‘Jennifer Weiner’ she said. ‘You know, there’s an author in Philadelphia with that exact same name!’ I was still a little groggy — a patient-controlled morphine drip will do that to a girl — so I happily ‘fessed to being that author… which I maybe would not have done had I known one of the things very nice nurse would be doing over the night would be positioning my butt over a bedpan and squirting my privates with warm water. I swear, this sort of thing doesn’t happen to Norman Mailer."
The personal posts are a little bit what people in cyberspace call TMI (too much information), but then again, that’s Jennifer Weiner, funny-gross, defiantly imperfect. The blog is a place for her to test her stuff, "like a comedian trying out material on the road." But recently, it has become less a diary or a hobby and more of a platform for Weiner, the smart girl who’s been adopted by the popular crowd, to post long discourses about what she sees as attacks on the chick-lit genre, herself, and, by extension, Womankind. It’s a chronicle of all the offenses that happen to female writers of a certain genre that do not happen to Norman Mailer.
"People use the term ‘chick lit’ to dismiss women writers," Weiner says at Pasión. "Any book with a young heroine dealing with a dysfunctional family, romantic issues or family trauma, any book with autobiographical components," gets slapped with that label. "It’s not fair. When Jonathan Safran Foer’s first book came out, you know, it was about him, but I feel like the tone of the pieces written about him was much more respectful, and much more, oooh, fancy writer. But when women’s books come out, it’s like, oh, you’re not a real writer, you’re just publishing your diary."
She has a point: The celluloid version of fellow Princeton grad Safran Foer’s book, Everything Is Illuminated, was released in September, and thus far, at least, Safran Foer has not been photographed in a bathtub to promote it. He’s the "writer that Princeton wants to talk about, he’s got much more of a literary pedigree than I do," Weiner says, cheerfully bitter. "I’m their dirty little secret."
"She’s cultivated such an interesting role for herself in the literary community, or at the very least, the lit-blogging community, anyway," says Wendy McClure, whose novel I’m Not the New Me features a jacket blurb by Weiner. "She’s had a lot to say about the way women’s books are categorized and has taken a lot of the snobbery about chick lit to task."
