Once I’d read Bridget Jones’s Diary I was dying for similar novels, but the term “chick lit” didn’t exist yet and I had no way of searching for them. (There were of course other books out there, but they were pretty much all in England, and I didn’t discover them until later.) So it was [...]

No serious discussion of chick lit can take place without mention of Bridget Jones’s Diary, by Helen Fielding, which pretty much started the entire genre. There’s nothing I can say about this book that hasn’t been said – it’s side-splittingly funny, and it’s playful and clever and escapist and just downright fun. It’s the first [...]