Journalist Erica Kennedy first burst onto the fiction scene in 2004 with her debut novel, BLING, a satirical look at the over-the-top, champagne popping world of hip hop. After garnering commercial and critical success for BLING, she’s back with the hysterical sophomore follow-up, FEMINISTA.
FEMINISTA follows thirty-something heroine Sydney Zamora as she writes and shops her way through New York City. Sydney isn’t your typical chick lit protagonist pining away for a man to save her, she’s a go-getter who is out for self and doesn’t care what others have to say about her brash personality. At thirty-three, she seems to have it all: a high paying writing gig at a magazine, a collection of designer shoes, and a best friend who adores her, but she feels like something is missing: love. FEMINISTA takes us on a hilarious (literally laugh out loud funny) journey as Sydney struggles to figure out who she really is and perhaps snag the love she’s missing out on.
Recently, I had the opportunity to chat with Ms. Kennedy about her novels, her writing process, and the death of Chick Lit.
Britni Danielle: On your blog, The Feminista Files, you’ve defined the term FEMINISTA. What made you want to write this book?
Erica Kennedy: FEMINISTA is my word for the empowered woman of style. I actually got the title from Lipstick Jungle, Candace Bushnell’s novel. She used “feminista” in passing to describe some powerful women and I realized it fit this idea of duality that I was already thinking about. When people hear the word “feminist” they think of a strong woman and any “-ista” coinage makes us think of a fashionable woman. FEMINISTA is a meld of those two things: the independent woman who might want a high-powered career but also might want to wear cute shoes that show off her pretty pink toenails.
In my 20s I read a lot of chick lit, looking to those single-girl-in-the-city books to explain all the things I was trying to figure out. And they never did! It always seemed like the same template: girl is single or just dumped at the beginning and then you go on this whole journey just so she finds a guy at the end, making her happiness once again dependent on a man. Like, WTF?
I’m also a screenwriter so I see a lot of romantic comedies and read those scripts and they’re often just as frustrating. Yet I always WANT those chick lit/flicks to be good because I want to see myself and my struggles reflected back to me. Because on some level, we all go thru the same girl shit. It’s like when Anna Wintour told Oprah she needed to lose 20 pounds to be on the cover of Vogue, Oprah went on a diet right quick! I’m always waiting for Oprah to distance herself from that like, “Can you believe I did that?” but she STILL talks wistfully about that Vogue cover! That’s what I call “basic girl shit”. You can be a billionaire mogul, philanthropist, icon to millions but dammit if you don’t want to have a framed Vogue cover on your office wall that shows you at your most svelte!
So I wanted to write something that was unabashedly chick lit but also wasn’t just fluff. That shows a woman dealing with her weight, wanting to find a guy, mother issues — basic girl shit — but who also has real flaws. Not just, you know, she’s klutzy and thinks her thighs shouldn’t touch. I wanted to push the limits of the genre.
BD: Publisher’s Weekly described FEMINISTA as a “crazed black romantic comedy.” That description made me feel some type of way because it didn’t (in my opinion) accurately describe the novel. Because the book is so ethnically diverse, I felt Publisher Weekly’s description was too easy and perhaps a little off-putting to a larger (non-black) audience. Do you think by labeling it as a “crazed black romantic comedy” they were limiting your audience? And how do you overcome it?
EK: UGH! As soon as I saw that description I was annoyed because I knew people would think exactly what you thought although I am certain they meant “dark comedy” not something relating to race. And I am certain of that because Sydney is multiracial but never described as “black” and most of the other characters are white so there’s no reason they would describe it as such.
But I knew some people would take it that way since I am a black author. It’s the kind of thing that I think a white person would write without having ANY perception of how that might be perceived. As far as “crazed”, I don’t know what that means other than Sydney gets into some crazy antics. But I am also a screenwriter so I plot out my books where there is always forward motion to the story with real cause-and-effect plot points as opposed to most chick lit where it’s just that the main character starts out woefully single, ends up with a guy and in between she whines to her friends over cocktails.
get.this.book.pronto.
BD: Speaking of Publisher’s Weekly, it said FEMINISTA ushered in a new genre, Bitch Lit. How do you feel about this new genre of women’s literature and were you aiming to kill Chick Lit as we know it?
EK: I think chick lit has already killed itself. It doesn’t really need much help from me. Jezebel did a post early on that talked about Sydney being a new prototype and in that post even chick lit authors said they think the genre is dead. A lot of that has to do with the economy — who wants to read “Confessions of a Shopaholic” now? It also may have to do with reality culture. We relate to what feels more realistic and I think, whether you love or hate her, Sydney is very relatable.
I also really appreciate that Essence, Latina, Disgrasian, Jezebel, all these sites aimed at different demographics, have written about the book. I feel this is a universal story — how do we as women find balance in our lives — and I like that a diverse group of women can find something to relate to in this book.
Also making Sydney multiracial allowed her to CHOOSE how she identifies. And I think she identifies as a woman of color because she wants to be part of an “oppressed class”, even though she grew up in Scarsdale with a lawyer father and a mother who’s a trophy wife on her fourth marriage. (Lots of rich, biracial chicks like that at Sarah Lawrence, my alma mater!) It’s like when she tells Max she’s multiracial, she says “I get offended for everybody”. That’s what she wants. A reason to rage against the machine (whatever she decides “the machine” is at any given moment).
BD: The protagonist of FEMINISTA, Sydney Zamora, is a multi-racial, brainiac college-dropout, who has a chip on her shoulder, and loves to shop (for discounts!). No matter who you are, you can relate to a little bit of Sydney. Did you set out to make her fit into so many categories? How did the character of Sydney come about?
EK: I wanted this to be a romantic comedy that touched on practical concerns. Sydney has a lot of issues around money — having it, feeling like she doesn’t have enough, spending, saving. Which I think is probably true for a lot of women. And she’s also concerned about finding a man who can be a provider for her and the family she wants to have. That’s real. Especially in this economy. But chick lit/flicks never get into that — it’s always just “I love you now let’s get married”!
I also wanted Sydney to be angry and SHOW that anger because I think a woman showing her anger is a feminist act. As women we are socialized to be nice, to not make waves, to put others first. Sydney is the antithesis of all that. She’s angry, she’s confrontational, she’s always looking out for number one. When I was writing FEM, I was reading a lot of books about “shadow work”, the Jungian idea that we all have this shadow side comprised of traits we don’t like about ourselves and therefore try to repress. Sydney is someone who lets her shadow side just hang the fuck out in broad daylight. A woman like that can make people uncomfortable which I love because then we have to ask WHY we are uncomfortable.
The reactions to Sydney have really run the gamut from “I am her” or “I adore her” to “I can’t stand that bitch”! lol It’s really about what the reader is projecting on to her. She’s like a fictional Rorschach test!
Case in point: There was a woman in my FB group who read FEM on a plane to South Africa and as soon as she got there she hit me up on Gchat to tell me how much she HATED Sydney. Like I think she wanted her to die by the end or something. I knew this woman pretty well and I knew she was having such a visceral reaction for a reason but I said, “Okay, great, that’s how you feel. Thanks for G-chatting me from South Africa to tell me that!”
A couple days later she commented in the group that the reason she hated Sydney so much was because she was going through a shitty time in her life and, as a defense mechanism, she had become very “I don’t need anybody” abrasive, like Sydney, and she hated seeing that reflection of herself. I suspected that but was so glad she came to that conclusion on her own and “spoke it” out loud (in a FB comment). The shadow revealed itself, honey!!! LOL.
BD: There are several parts of the novel, which literally made me laugh out loud, how did you manage to write with such humor without the book coming off as one big joke?
EK: Well, essentially I think of myself as a humorist. The reason I wanted to write my first book, Bling, was because I would do interviews with hip-hop stars and they would say what I thought of as the funniest shit EVER but they’d be dead-ass serious. And I couldn’t just straight clown them in a Vibe profile so I wrote a satire about that world instead. But at the same time, I was still able to touch on issues of race and class in Bling because as absurd as that world can be, it’s also an undeniably powerful force in popular culture so I wanted to respect that.
With a book like FEMINISTA, you need to have a lot of humor to balance Sydney’s aggression. I did alternating chapters with her and Max because he’s this carefree guy and his chapters give you a break from Sydney’s drama which can be interesting to a point. Even Mitzi the matchmaker, who is a total comic foil, says some very real shit about men and dating. (She’s based on a real matchmaker.) The fun of writing fiction is figuring out how to balance all that stuff.
BD: Your first novel, BLING, was a New York Times Best Seller and Miramax bought the film rights, however, I read that you had a hard time shopping FEMINISTA. Why do you think publishers weren’t as open to this novel?
Because men can get away with anything while women are expected to be good girls who know their place.
In Bling, the male characters did drugs, had menage a trois, freely used homophobic slurs, there was an attempted rape! And everyone was like, Oh so funny! But with FEMINISTA, you basically just have a very opinionated, assertive heroine and it was like, “She’s not likable”. Really? *eye roll* Also, I sold on a partial which means the first 10 chapters and a lot of those editors couldn’t see Sydney’s arc. That all this trouble she was cooking up for herself was going to come back to bite her in the ass later.
In these times, no one wants to take a chance on something new and this is a very different kind of chick lit. So different that Publisher’s Weekly gave it this label, “bitch lit”. They actually called me “the pioneer of bitch lit” and as soon as I saw that I knew what it meant. That I was going to have to take all the shit so the chick who writes a “bitch lit” two years from now can get all the glory. And that’s fine with me. If it can open the door for more complex heroines to live, awesome.
BD: My readers, a lot of whom are writers and aspiring novelists, always want to know: what does your writing process look like?
EK: Very haphazard. I have ADD, something I was only coming to understand during the writing of this book. So that means that I “burst work” where I’ll write a whole bunch of pages and then I’ll get distracted by something else. But I’ve developed a lot of techniques to help me focus.
One technique is that I’ll listen to certain songs on repeat with headphones to block out any other noise or distractions. That helps me get into “flow” – flow psychology is a whole science that you can read about. Sometimes it’ll be a playlist of 2 or 3 songs with the right tempo that creates the energy I need at that moment. Sometimes it’ll be just one song! I can’t tell you how many times I listened to Aaliyah’s “Rock the Boat” while writing FEM. That used to be my flow jam!
After you’ve listened to a song on repeat a couple of times, it becomes like white noise and you just go into a kind of trance. I have listened to the same songs for 8 hours and then I could not tell you what any of the lyrics were afterward because the music just disappears.
I also wrote a lot of chapters by hand — sometimes on the beach in Miami where I was living. When you write on a computer, you can get into editing and perfecting when you should just be creating. When you write in a notebook, you keep going and power through, scribbling in the margins and everything because you can’t just delete and rewrite something. Or Google anything which is the worst distraction!
I almost always write a full chapter in one sitting because that’s how I catch and maintain a rhythm. Then I go back at another time and edit.
BD: What advice would you give an up and coming woman writer (especially a woman of color) about writing and getting published?
EK: I would say do something else! How horrible is that? But honestly, the publishing industry is so lost right now. It’s an old school world that is drowning in a sea of new school ideas. They don’t know what they’re doing and they’re too arrogant to admit they don’t know and try to adapt.
Just yesterday, I was reading about how media mogul Rupert Murdoch wants to charge for content and not let Google index content from his newspapers. And the founders of Twitter and Linked In were openly making fun of him like he’s just some senile old man — which is what he sounds like.
All these social media entrepreneurs are guys in their 20s or 30s. They’ve grown up on the internet, so it’s a comfortable domain for them. They know how to stay fluid and when it comes to social media, fluidity is the name of the game. We all know that FB, Google, Twitter are adding and tweaking features constantly. But for old school media players who’ve done things the same way for 25 years, this new world is very jarring. And since they don’t want to learn to swim, they’ll eventually sink.
Not to be completely depressing, I do think e-readers will one day take over and writers will be able to publish more easily and directly without dealing with the obstacle of old publishing. Let’s hope that happens really soon.
BD: You’re a journalist, blogger, and have two novels (BLING and FEMINISTA) under your belt, what’s up next?
EK: I write screenplays now. I’m polishing the screenplay for FEM and reps for a couple of big actresses are reading the book now so we’ll see what happens. My dream is to be a script doctor — to come in like a hitman, fix a script, get out with a check and no one ever knows you were there.
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