Jojo Moyes: ‘Chick lit’ is a misogynist label for my books
Classifying all stories about women who find love as ‘chick lit’ or ‘romance’ does a disservice to readers and the female experience, says bestselling English novelist Jojo Moyes.
Although her wildly popular novels always include a love story, Jojo Moyes says it's 14 years since she published a work of ‘romantic fiction’.
There’s “a subtle misogyny” to dismissing any novel that features a woman falling in love as ‘chick lit’ or “just romance”, the English writer says.
Moyes’ latest book We All Live Here - which follows a 42-year-old divorcee's "messy" life with two wayward daughters and an elderly stepfather - is striking a chord with female readers like none before, she tells Susie Ferguson.
Penguin Books Ltd
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On international book tours this year, lines of women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s have come up to Moyes feeling “joyful” about how well We All Live Here reflected their own experience.
“I do get a lot of smiley women but this one has been off the scale.”
In fiction, women in midlife are often either really annoying mothers, horrible mothers-in-law or downtrodden wives, Moyes says.
In We All Live Here she wanted to show that often they're also pretty amazing - “capable and funny and loyal and strong and basically holding up the sky for everybody else.”
Moyes hopes We All Live Here's quick ascent to number one on the English book charts will send a message to publishing companies about the demand for stories about the real-life experiences of 40-something women.
“Women of this age are often invisible to a lot of people but not to each other.”
While Moyes is very grateful for now having a “built-in” readership, she weathered a lot of rejection on her way to becoming a published novellist.
Over a five-year period in which she worked as a journalist and became a mother Moyes thought she could achieve the dream if she just kept going and tried harder.
But after three books were rejected, she started to suspect she was “one of those writers who just doesn't appeal to people”
“I kept putting my heart and soul into these books and the publishers would do their best and come up with a new cover and a marketing plan and then it just wouldn't happen.”
Twenty-three years after publishing her debut novel Sheltering Rain, Moyes rejects the assumption that fiction by women is usually autobiographical and the expectation that female writers will dish on their personal lives in interviews.
"Some people are great about talking about themselves. They love to publicise all sorts of things. For me, it actually destabilises me. I feel like I’ve given away part of my soul."
While she spoke a little about her family in years past - “the price to pay for some publicity” - she’s comfortable being more private now.
Although Moyes felt “very wobbly” about dragging her ex-husband Charles Arthur and their three children into the spotlight after her divorce went public in 2020, she’s also very proud that after 22 years of marriage, she and Arthur managed to separate very amicably and quietly.
While she spent the 2010s working too much - parenting while writing books during the day and film scripts at night and travelling a lot - Moyes says she has a much better work-life balance now and takes neither for granted.
“I make sure that I get to walk my dogs for an hour and a half every day. I have a number of hobbies that I do. I see friends… I'm lucky in that I get to balance the two things but I'm always conscious that there'll come a point when people aren't interested in me at all so I do try to do as much as I can while I can. I feel very lucky that people are still reading the books.”
