(Apologies for the delay in posting this column. Page to Screen will return to its regular Tuesday spot next week.)
Chick-lit, the unflatteringly named brand of light confessional writing intended to universalize the problems of modern professional women, has been a beast of a publishing phenomenon since the near-simultaneous arrival on the scene of Helen Fielding’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” in the late 1990s.
Marked by clear Transatlantic cultural differences, those volumes were nonetheless linked by their semi-autobiographical nature, their urban media milieu, a similar issue slate of sex, career, mild vice and the ongoing hunt for Mr. Right/Darcy/Big and a tone of chatty journalese – both, after all, were spinoffs of popular newspaper columns.
They also have one other crucial thing in common: massively successful screen translations that continue to bear fruit. A third big-screen Bridget Jones outing is currently in the works, and you may have heard something about a film called “Sex and the City 2” this summer.
In Fielding and Bushnell’s wake, then, have come a legion of female writers and journalists converting their personal experiences into bestseller status and swift deals with Hollywood: the success of such titles as “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Julie & Julia,” “Confessions of a Shopaholic,” and the male co-authored “He’s Just Not That Into You” hardly discourage the trend. (You could even argue for last year’s “An Education” as an arthouse twist on the formula.)