I was reading an article in USA Today about moms in fiction. Actually, the title is Fiction: Motherhood. I have no idea why I was engaging in this reading activity, but I was.
A bunch of new titles are referenced. You can click on the article title (above) to go check them out. The titles were not what caught my attention. Nope. This introductory sentence of a blurb/review of The Yummy Mummy by Polly Williams did it:
In the USA, novels about exhausted young mothers are called Mommy Lit. The more practical British call it Baby Sick Lit. The Yummy Mummy by England’s Polly Williams is a scrumptious example.
Ignoring for a second the title of Williams’ book, is this statement true? There is something out there called Baby Sick Lit? Really? Uh, why?
A quick google search of this…what exactly is it, a new subgenre title, a term, what? Well, whatever it is, goggle produced a few results. Most lead back to the Williams book. Another was an article in the Sunday Independent. To read the entire article I would have had to register for the site. I didn’t care enough about this topic to do that, so I didn’t. But, the beginning of the article goes like this:
Thirty years later, we have the ickily-titled ‘Mummy lit’ – or ‘Baby Sick lit’ as it is sometimes called. Like its predecessor, Chick lit, Mummy lit is popular writing for women, but now we have exchanged nightclubs, mojitos and Manolos for Sudocrem and biodegradable nappies.
I think we have officially found The One Step Too Far in the Lit-naming craze.
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