Interesting article in today's Independent interviewing Daisy Goodwin, chair of the jury for this year's Orange Prize for Women's Fiction. She is utterly depressed by the amount of "misery lit" out there. "If I read another sensitive account of a woman coming to terms with bereavement, I was going to slit my wrists," she says.

This is distressing, not least because I'm working on a novel that's in part, oh dear, a sensitive account of a woman coming to terms with bereavement... But there's a reason I'm doing this, besides all the psychobabble about the catharsis of creativity etc, and I suspect that a great many other women writers are experiencing the same motivation. We are sick to death of the assumption that because we are women we must be writing CHICKLIT. 

Chicklit sells in squillions, and so for far too long publishers in Britain have been trying to dress everything else up to look like it. They say they don't, of course - mine reassured me that they have a particular 'look' for their chicklit covers and it is not the look they have given my novels. Unfortunately, nobody has explained the difference to the readers. These days jolly-jolly, pretty-pretty, girly-wurly covers of all types are instantly assumed by the book-buying public to be chicklit. Most women writers who want to be perceived as tackling themes beyond the buying of high-heeled shoes and the seduction of Mr Perfect (plus their sequels re sudden relegation to Nappy Valley) loathe the concept of chicklit - which is a marketing phenomenon more than a literary one - and don't want their work to be mistaken for it. 

Therefore we have resorted to the tactic of choosing themes that are as dark and miserable as possible. So that nobody can possibly consider putting a girly-wurly cover on top of it. So that we have to be taken bloody seriously for a change. Because publishers - who are often women themselves - are perpetrating via their presentation a miserable sexist assumption that women writers only write fluff, and that that is all women readers want to read.

That's why, in the 21st century FGS, we still need the Orange Prize, which draws attention to serious writing exclusively by women. It shouldn't be necessary, when glorious novelists like Rose Tremain, Margaret Atwood, Lionel Shriver and A.S. Byatt prove with every word that the quality of women's writing can match or exceed men's, no question. But necessary it is. A plea to the book trade: stop window-dressing as fluff work that is not fluff and then maybe we'll feel more positive about the prospect of writing you some pleasurable, redemptive, interesting, grown-up books once again.

UPDATE, Thursday a.m.: Jojo Moyes has a terrific piece in the Telegraph saying much the same, but blaming critics rather than the book trade. All part of the same thing, I guess. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/7466372/Why-is-womens-fiction-so-miserable.html

More interesting commentary: Joan Smith in the Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/joan-smith/joan-smith-one-womans-misery-is-another-booksellers-joy-1922965.html