The first time I encountered English author Sophie Kinsella’s work, I was in the seventh grade, furtively being passed a copy of her 2001 novel Confessions of a Shopaholic in study hall by a classmate whose name I’ve since forgotten. What I’ve never forgotten, though, is the joy of losing myself in protagonist Becky Bloomwood’s fun, frothy world. Yes, a little part of me recognized shades of my own nascent compulsive behavior in her shopping addiction even then, but I was thrilled to encounter an adult protagonist who seemed to take as much enjoyment in life as the heroines of my YA Gossip Girl and The Clique novels did (or, actually, much more, since nobody could have mistaken The Clique’s Machiavellian mean girl Massie Block for happy).
I’m as devoted as the next feminist to the goal of excising the words chick lit from our cultural vocabulary (or, if we must use them, we should at least get to call the collected works of Karl Ove Knausgård “dick lit”), but Kinsella—who died this week at the age of 55—effortlessly elevated the form that pejorative term describes, spinning Bloomwood’s adventures in retail into a nine-book series that covered everything from Hollywood to anti-consumerism without ever losing its signature spark.
I most recently reread the Shopaholic series—and I do mean the entire series—two Christmases ago, when I was moving homes for the 10th time in my life and balancing the traditional holiday rush of last-minute work with fitful bouts of packing and near-constant Home Depot runs for my new place. I was exhausted, strung out, and desperately in need of something fun to read. (It simply did not feel like the time for the nonfiction history of the American labor movement on my new nightstand.) I decided, in that moment, to reward myself each night after a hard day’s work with a trip into Bloomwood-land, and what a joy it was to find that the Shopaholic books proved just as effective in sucking me in as they had back when I was getting detention for reading them in middle school.
I recently moved again, into a studio apartment in Hollywood—my eleventh adult apartment, but my first time living alone in Los Angeles—and when it came time to fill in my giant Ikea bookshelf, I proudly pulled my Jennifer Weiner novels, Curtis Sittenfeld short-story collections, and original bright-pink copy of Confessions of a Shopaholic out of their myriad boxes and placed them right next to my John Berryman poetry collections and Tennessee Williams plays.
Thanks in large part to Kinsella and the scores of writers she inspired, I’m not ashamed of my “chick lit” tastes. Indeed, I’m so grateful for the chance to spend time with characters like Becky Bloomwood that it feels like the least I can do is offer them pride of place on my shelf.
