Chick Lit , broadly defined (by Wikipedia), is a novel of the romance genre  featuring a single, urban, hip, twenty or thirtyish working woman in a glamorous job whose primary concern is finding Mr. Right.  Bridget Jones was the prototype, and her endless variations have led the way to the best-seller list ever since.

I love chick lit novels as much as the next woman and imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but when I sat down to write one, I found myself much more interested in Sugar, Jessie’s mother, than in Jessie herself, who was the original protagonist of what was then titled  “Nick of Time.”  I just couldn’t manage that air of insouciance, idealism, and yes, innocence that a proper chick lit “voice” requires; once I realized that, I’d found the heart and soul of  SUGAR TIME. 

 It’s not that I’m not interested in young women; as a social psychologist I’ve focused on how we change over time, a lifespan perspective pioneered by Roger Gould and popularized in Gail Sheehy’s  influential Passages. I’ve always written about whatever stage of life I was in at the time and  been lucky enough to get other people tell me what I needed to know about how to live through it and then write books about it, from Sex and the Single Parent to When Our Grown Kids Disappoint Us (which is another story, but the book after that was  Boundary Issues, which should tell you something.)  The novels I wrote in 30 years and eleven books all  dealt with the same themes - how people, especially women,  respond emotionally to change at turning points in their lives. 

It wasn’t until I began SUGAR TIME that I remembered how much fun it is to write a novel – to color outside the lines, create characters I wanted to spend time with, people whose issues and concerns were those of women my age, or as Sugar puts it, “Between your first issue of Modern Maturity and your first Social Security check.” They’re not the same as the chick lit heroines – it’s our experience that shows, just like our stretch marks. By now we’ve lived through what Judith Viorst memorably called Ordinary Losses and if we’re lucky, we have some wisdom borne of that experience.  What we haven’t lost, though, is our sense of humor – at least, Sugar hasn’t. You can judge for yourself how much wisdom there is in SUGAR TIME, but one thing’s certain - there are a lot of laughs.

www.sugartimethenovel.com