Come on, not all books by women authors have shoes on the cover. Some books with shoes on the cover are good (In Her Shoes) and others are not (The Devil Wears Prada). But I would not compare Jennifer Weiner, Kaye Gibbons, Billie Letts or Joyce Carol Oates to Lauren Weisberger. We bring all women authors down when we complain about pink and shoe covers on books that are about pink and shoes or compare even In Her Shoes to The World is Flat.

BUST magazine, in side-by-side reviews of This Is Chick-Lit, of which I'm editor as well as a contributor, and This is Not Chick Lit, opens their review: "Like a lot of snotty literary types, I have often sneered at chick lit...I'm here to tell you: I was wrong." It's always great when people can get past a cover to see what's inside, just like it's great when people meet other people and judge them on something other than mere physical appearance.

If you "go into embarrassing, flailing convulsions when I pass the pink ghetto at my local chain bookstore," perhaps you can lobby your employer to use something other than PINK for broadsheet and get rid of the very chick lit mascot. I find that embarassing.

Whether or not "chick lit" is "lit" or not, it has been my observation that a man can write a novel using the exact same kind of melodramatic devices and it is never included in the genre as "chick lit" simply because a man wrote it. Oftentimes, it is looked on as ground-breaking or actual lit, probably because the people deciding such things have never read "chick lit" or women's romances in any depth so they don't know how trite the writing actually is.