ouch
No, I’m not in labour. We paid the bills and shredded the correspondence. I sorted all of Julia’s clothes while Jeremy converted Claire’s crib to a toddler bed. We put the dollhouse in Claire’s room and the Moses basket in ours. We found new homes for the towels and bed-linen displaced by Julia’s clothes. We replaced the icky brown curtains with pretty champagne-coloured ones. We carried stuff into the attic and emptied the drip pan underneath the leak in the roof. I even sorted the CDs and DVDs, because GOD FORBID that my daughter should come home to a house with an untidy media cabinet.
I’m wrecked.
I read Jennifer Weiner’s In Her Shoes, because someone had cited her as unfairly maligned chick lit. I read Cynthia Ozick’s The Puttermesser Papers immediately afterwards. In Her Shoes stars Rose, a 34-year-old single lawyer who quits to start a dog-walking business and eventually marries a nice man from her old firm. The Puttermesser Papers stars Ruth Puttermesser, a 34-year-old single lawyer who creates a golem from the soil under the pot plants in her apartment. The golem becomes her campaign manager, and Puttermesser is elected mayor of New York.
And that, my friends, is the difference between chick lit and lit.
