Reached by email, Ms. Sittenfeld (who used to write for The Observer from time-to-time and is also the author of 2005's Prep), said that despite back-to-back novels with Presidential themes, she is "definitely not becoming a political novelist."

She described the assignment from Slate as "a fun one-time experiment," adding, "my next novel will have nothing to do with Washington, Republicans, Democrats, or any other real people."

While the whole novella is already written, Ms. Sittenfeld said she conceived it "in a more segmented way" with serialization in mind. She saidt that she'll be watching the news leading up to the January 20th event and will update her story with any new details.

"I'm not going to the Inauguration," she continued. "My husband and I are going to watch it in our living room and we're probably going to clap (him) and cry tears of joy (me)."

If you're in St. Louis, their "unprepossessing, book-filled brick house" (per The New York Times' Jan Hoffman last summer) shouldn't be hard to find: According to Ms. Sittenfeld, her husband "wants to bring our Obama yard sign back out of retirement for the day."

The problem with hating Ms. Freudenberger, as Ms. Sittenfeld and others grudgingly admitted, was that Lucky Girls was good (although this was also another reason to hate her). In places, it was really good. The five stories in the collection were about privileged but displaced young women, battling isolation abroad while families fell apart back home. For a generation of students and young adults who gather “experiences” in foreign countries like an obscure form of currency, Ms. Freudenberger’s depictions said something about what it is—and what it is not—to be an American abroad: “Americans could go all over the world and still be Americans,” Zubin, an Indian SAT tutor, observes in one story, “they could live just the way they did at home and nobody wondered who they were, or why they were doing the things they did.”

Though set in exotic locations—Bangkok, New Delhi, Bombay—the stories in Lucky Girls did not depend on cultural dislocation for their punch. The “language gap” between Americans and their foreign hosts concerned Ms. Freudenberger primarily as a metaphor for deeper miscommunications between mothers and daughters and husbands and wives. In a characteristic instance of warring vocabularies, a New York mother, Alice, tries to discover what exactly her daughter Mandy, working with AIDS babies in Thailand, really means by the word “rape”:

“‘It was a misunderstanding,’ [Mandy] said. ‘It was a cultural thing, actually.’ And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, ‘He’s not a rapist.’

“‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but if he raped you, he is a rapist.’

“And Mandy said, ‘Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.’”

It was Ms. Freudenberger’s superb ear for family dynamics, rather than her unpretentious travel writing, that allowed readers of Lucky Girls such bracing access to the emotional lives of her characters. How perplexing, then, that in Ms. Freudenberger’s debut novel, The Dissident, her ear seems to have failed her. The novel, though concerned with themes similar to those of her previous work, indulges in stock reflections on cultural misunderstanding and generic domestic melodrama.

Part of the problem is that Ms. Freudenberger, who drew on her experiences teaching English in India and Thailand for her first collection, seems to rely in her novel preponderantly on research. Her protagonist and part-time narrator is an avant-garde Chinese artist who lands a residency in Beverly Hills, teaching studio art at St. Anselm’s School for Girls and boarding with a privileged but dysfunctional family named Travers. To tell the story of what happens to him in Los Angeles, the dissident insists, he has to tell another story, of his teenage years in a subversive Beijing artistic clique formed in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square uprisings.

This backstory is told mostly through the kind of exposition better suited to textbooks than novels. The upshot is that, in June of 1994, Chinese police raided and destroyed the enclave for political reasons, a crisis foreshadowed in the dissident’s personal life by the discovery two months earlier that his university girlfriend and his cousin were having an affair. These episodes are meant to connect—though the ties are discouragingly tenuous—to a string of events set off when a ragged Chinese student named June Wang wanders into the dissident’s honors art class at St. Anselm’s.

If Americans can live “just the way they did at home” all over the world, Ms. Freudenberger suggests that the opposite is true for the dissident, who arouses suspicion—or, worse, an overbearing sensitivity—wherever he treads. At school, a jealous student accuses him of sexual misconduct. Chez Travers, the matronly Cece overdoes her welcome and her novelist sister-in-law, Joan, digs intrusively into the dissident’s past.

The past is a delicate matter for the dissident, but he quickly discovers that he has little to fear from the rest of the Travers family—they’re kept busy by their own problems. Cece and her distant husband, Gordon, are discussing a divorce. Their teenage son, Max, has been arrested for driving with a gun in his car. Their daughter, Olivia, may be anorexic. And Gordon’s estranged brother Phil—who is also Cece’s former lover—has shown up unexpectedly from New York.

If these situations sound predictable, it’s because they are. Still, when describing the Travers family life, Ms. Freudenberger displays flashes of the insight and sensitivity that distinguished her previous writing. It is no accident that the novel’s most eloquent scene occurs after the dissident has gone home: when Cece and Gordon, left alone, banter over the consequences of their imminent separation. Gordon, a professor, explains that he would like to stay in the house until the end of the school year, because it’s a “convenient commute” to his office. Cece is confident enough to translate:

“She had gotten so used to the way Gordon spoke; when he said the house was a ‘convenient commute,’ what he meant was that he loved it. What would he do, if he couldn’t go out every afternoon and check the temperature of the pool?”

One senses here a reserve of perspicacity that fails to illuminate the more diligently explored relationships in the book. Indeed, the novel slides like a magnet toward the themes that resonated most powerfully in Ms. Freudenberger’s earlier fiction—the grim details of a dissolving marriage, the emotional innuendo that lurks behind every sensible compromise.

But Ms. Freudenberger strays from these themes when she allows the dissident to take over a significant portion of her story. He’s an uninspired wordsmith for whom English is a second language: At the American consulate in Wulumuqi Nan Lu, the dissident passes guards who are “stone-faced”; his stomach “is growling” and his anxiety is “similar to stage-fright”; everyone in line is quiet like “students in an examination.” Yes, it sounds like a foreigner attempting to communicate in colloquial English, but the tax on the reader is too high.

The dissident’s trip to the visa office also furnishes a good example of Ms. Freudenberger’s penchant for research overload. As he waits in line, we learn about all the different kinds of visas the dissident could have applied for (“O” visa, “J-1 Exchange Visitor” visa, etc.). We learn that “these days” the U.S. visa section is “located in the five-star Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel complex, but at that time they were still operating out of the old consulate.” We learn that the old consulate was really a house that used to belong to the Qing finance minister. We learn that there are ginkgo trees and frogs.

The passage, like so much contemporary writing set abroad, is strangled by irrelevant information—irrelevant not because it is uninteresting (although in this case it is), but because it fails to illuminate anything significant about the character. By the end of the novel, the dissident strikes us as little more than a funnel through which pours useless detail. Ms. Freudenberger’s research yields some compelling ruminations on Chinese politics and art, but nothing that saves her protagonist from falling flat on the page. Publicity materials for the novel promise the reader will be “introduced to an influential subculture of artists living in contemporary Beijing.” This is precisely the case: The reader is introduced to “a subculture” (two subcultures, actually, if you count Beverly Hills)—but nary a human being.

Nell Freudenberger, like the traveling students she delicately satirized in Lucky Girls, seems here to subscribe to the idea that the “culture clash” represented by a Chinese dissident in Beverly Hills is significant in itself. But she never gets around to explaining why. This is disappointing, especially coming from a writer whose previous work suggested that cultural comedy would be her beginning rather than her endpoint.

Jon Baskin has written for Salon and Bookforum.

The problem with hating Ms. Freudenberger, as Ms. Sittenfeld and others grudgingly admitted, was that Lucky Girls was good (although this was also another reason to hate her). In places, it was really good. The five stories in the collection were about privileged but displaced young women, battling isolation abroad while families fell apart back home. For a generation of students and young adults who gather “experiences” in foreign countries like an obscure form of currency, Ms. Freudenberger’s depictions said something about what it is—and what it is not—to be an American abroad: “Americans could go all over the world and still be Americans,” Zubin, an Indian SAT tutor, observes in one story, “they could live just the way they did at home and nobody wondered who they were, or why they were doing the things they did.”

Though set in exotic locations—Bangkok, New Delhi, Bombay—the stories in Lucky Girls did not depend on cultural dislocation for their punch. The “language gap” between Americans and their foreign hosts concerned Ms. Freudenberger primarily as a metaphor for deeper miscommunications between mothers and daughters and husbands and wives. In a characteristic instance of warring vocabularies, a New York mother, Alice, tries to discover what exactly her daughter Mandy, working with AIDS babies in Thailand, really means by the word “rape”:

“‘It was a misunderstanding,’ [Mandy] said. ‘It was a cultural thing, actually.’ And when Alice expressed skepticism about the need for cross-cultural understanding with rapists, Mandy said, ‘He’s not a rapist.’

“‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but if he raped you, he is a rapist.’

“And Mandy said, ‘Don’t call him that, Mom. He’s my boyfriend.’”

It was Ms. Freudenberger’s superb ear for family dynamics, rather than her unpretentious travel writing, that allowed readers of Lucky Girls such bracing access to the emotional lives of her characters. How perplexing, then, that in Ms. Freudenberger’s debut novel, The Dissident, her ear seems to have failed her. The novel, though concerned with themes similar to those of her previous work, indulges in stock reflections on cultural misunderstanding and generic domestic melodrama.

Part of the problem is that Ms. Freudenberger, who drew on her experiences teaching English in India and Thailand for her first collection, seems to rely in her novel preponderantly on research. Her protagonist and part-time narrator is an avant-garde Chinese artist who lands a residency in Beverly Hills, teaching studio art at St. Anselm’s School for Girls and boarding with a privileged but dysfunctional family named Travers. To tell the story of what happens to him in Los Angeles, the dissident insists, he has to tell another story, of his teenage years in a subversive Beijing artistic clique formed in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square uprisings.

This backstory is told mostly through the kind of exposition better suited to textbooks than novels. The upshot is that, in June of 1994, Chinese police raided and destroyed the enclave for political reasons, a crisis foreshadowed in the dissident’s personal life by the discovery two months earlier that his university girlfriend and his cousin were having an affair. These episodes are meant to connect—though the ties are discouragingly tenuous—to a string of events set off when a ragged Chinese student named June Wang wanders into the dissident’s honors art class at St. Anselm’s.

If Americans can live “just the way they did at home” all over the world, Ms. Freudenberger suggests that the opposite is true for the dissident, who arouses suspicion—or, worse, an overbearing sensitivity—wherever he treads. At school, a jealous student accuses him of sexual misconduct. Chez Travers, the matronly Cece overdoes her welcome and her novelist sister-in-law, Joan, digs intrusively into the dissident’s past.

The past is a delicate matter for the dissident, but he quickly discovers that he has little to fear from the rest of the Travers family—they’re kept busy by their own problems. Cece and her distant husband, Gordon, are discussing a divorce. Their teenage son, Max, has been arrested for driving with a gun in his car. Their daughter, Olivia, may be anorexic. And Gordon’s estranged brother Phil—who is also Cece’s former lover—has shown up unexpectedly from New York.

If these situations sound predictable, it’s because they are. Still, when describing the Travers family life, Ms. Freudenberger displays flashes of the insight and sensitivity that distinguished her previous writing. It is no accident that the novel’s most eloquent scene occurs after the dissident has gone home: when Cece and Gordon, left alone, banter over the consequences of their imminent separation. Gordon, a professor, explains that he would like to stay in the house until the end of the school year, because it’s a “convenient commute” to his office. Cece is confident enough to translate:

“She had gotten so used to the way Gordon spoke; when he said the house was a ‘convenient commute,’ what he meant was that he loved it. What would he do, if he couldn’t go out every afternoon and check the temperature of the pool?”

One senses here a reserve of perspicacity that fails to illuminate the more diligently explored relationships in the book. Indeed, the novel slides like a magnet toward the themes that resonated most powerfully in Ms. Freudenberger’s earlier fiction—the grim details of a dissolving marriage, the emotional innuendo that lurks behind every sensible compromise.

But Ms. Freudenberger strays from these themes when she allows the dissident to take over a significant portion of her story. He’s an uninspired wordsmith for whom English is a second language: At the American consulate in Wulumuqi Nan Lu, the dissident passes guards who are “stone-faced”; his stomach “is growling” and his anxiety is “similar to stage-fright”; everyone in line is quiet like “students in an examination.” Yes, it sounds like a foreigner attempting to communicate in colloquial English, but the tax on the reader is too high.

The dissident’s trip to the visa office also furnishes a good example of Ms. Freudenberger’s penchant for research overload. As he waits in line, we learn about all the different kinds of visas the dissident could have applied for (“O” visa, “J-1 Exchange Visitor” visa, etc.). We learn that “these days” the U.S. visa section is “located in the five-star Portman Ritz-Carlton Hotel complex, but at that time they were still operating out of the old consulate.” We learn that the old consulate was really a house that used to belong to the Qing finance minister. We learn that there are ginkgo trees and frogs.

The passage, like so much contemporary writing set abroad, is strangled by irrelevant information—irrelevant not because it is uninteresting (although in this case it is), but because it fails to illuminate anything significant about the character. By the end of the novel, the dissident strikes us as little more than a funnel through which pours useless detail. Ms. Freudenberger’s research yields some compelling ruminations on Chinese politics and art, but nothing that saves her protagonist from falling flat on the page. Publicity materials for the novel promise the reader will be “introduced to an influential subculture of artists living in contemporary Beijing.” This is precisely the case: The reader is introduced to “a subculture” (two subcultures, actually, if you count Beverly Hills)—but nary a human being.

Nell Freudenberger, like the traveling students she delicately satirized in Lucky Girls, seems here to subscribe to the idea that the “culture clash” represented by a Chinese dissident in Beverly Hills is significant in itself. But she never gets around to explaining why. This is disappointing, especially coming from a writer whose previous work suggested that cultural comedy would be her beginning rather than her endpoint.

Jon Baskin has written for Salon and Bookforum.

“The
more I think about the review,” Ms. Weiner continued on her Web site, “the more I think about the increasingly angry divide between ladies who write literature and chicks who write chick lit, the more it seems like a grown-up version of the smart versus pretty games of years ago; like so much jockeying for position in the cafeteria and mocking the girls who are nerdier/sluttier/stupider than you, to make yourself feel more secure about your own place in the pecking order.”

When
asked if she’d heard from Ms. Sittenfeld since she’d aired her grievances, Ms.
Weiner laughed. “Oh no. I think I’m far too déclassé for her to even admit knowing about,” she said. “It’s not a feud. I feel bad that I’m angry about the review and talking about it publicly, but I just feel that what she did doesn’t serve the cause of women writing. On my Web log, I said that the review seemed to me to be more about her own anxiety of what people think of her book—so it ended up being an 800-word exercise in showing how smart she is. It’s like we know you went to Stanford, we know you won the Seventeen fiction contest when you were 16, because every single article I’ve read about you manages to get that in there.” (Ms. Sittenfeld declined to comment for this article.)

The
labeling of certain types of female-written fiction as chick lit is a successful marketing phenomenon that many authors see as semi-derogatory.
The
backlash is palpable: Random House has plans to publish an anthology entitled This Is Not Chick Lit: A Collection of Original Stories by America’s Best Women Writers, which will include work by Ms. Sittenfeld as well as Francine Prose, Myla Goldberg and Jennifer Eagan among others. “The best of women authors? I don’t recall voting in that contest,” Ms. Weiner said with another laugh. “I think the general understanding is that any book with a young heroine dealing with a dysfunctional family, romantic issues or family trauma is now considered chick lit. It’s an easy way to throw them into one category and dismiss them. I felt like the review was making an argument that anyone that writes that kind of book is a child of a lesser literary god.

“I
do think there’s a component of sexism at work,” Ms. Weiner continued. “It’s like if a young woman writes it, then it’s chick lit. We don’t care if she’s slaying vampires or working as a nanny or living in Philadelphia. It’s chick lit, so who cares? You know what we call what men write? Books.”

A
Philadelphia Story

Deep
in the underbelly of the Javits Center during last month’s big Book Expo America fair, the line to meet Ms. Weiner snaked along the corridor. A menagerie of women of varying ages, sizes and styles of dress (and the occasional foot-shuffling male) approached the 35-year-old zaftig-by–New York–standards novelist as she perched atop a stool in a light knitted top and khaki slacks. She was busily signing the new paperback edition of Little Earthquakes, her third best-selling novel, which had followed in quick succession after 2001’s Good in Bed and 2002’s In Her Shoes. The sum total of her oeuvre has sold over four million copies.

“Women
react to her books the way kids react to Harry Potter,” said a member of “Team Weiner.”

“I’m
Barbara,” said a young woman in thick glasses, handing over a book to be signed. “Good in Bed changed my life. Changed it!”

“I’m
so glad to hear that,” Ms. Weiner replied warmly, as she would again and again for the next 30 minutes.

Most
signees fell into predictable categories: If they didn’t mention one of the book’s life-changing properties, they wondered when they could expect the next novel (Goodnight Nobody will come out in September) or when they could see the film version of In Her Shoes starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette and Shirley MacLaine (October). But they all approached the table with a notable lack of intimidation—most of the women leaning into the table conspiratorially, chatting as if with an old friend.

“Jennifer,
we were the first to know you were pregnant,” announced a bookseller from Ms.
Weiner’s adopted hometown of Philadelphia.

“Oh,
hi! It’s so nice to see you when I’m not nauseous,” Ms. Weiner replied.

A
few weeks later at a pan-Asian restaurant in the Society Hill neighborhood of Philly, Ms. Weiner was trying to sell a reporter on the idea that her quaint, cobblestoned surroundings made for a sort of sixth borough. “I love visiting New York,” she said. “I love it all—the shopping, the energy, the everything.
But then when I get to leave … ,” she trailed off, letting out a big contented sigh. “I think if you are in New York or Los Angeles, you have to kind of ‘make the scene’ and pal around the city with other writers. I can see how you get caught up in it. I think there’s a lot of anxiety and competitiveness going on—let’s face it, writers are all nuts. I’m just happier living in a normal place and having friends with real jobs.”

She
lives quietly in this “normal place” with her husband of four years, a lawyer named Adam Bonin, and a 2-year-old daughter, Lucy.   “I loved coming to the Book Expo,” she said. “It’s a taste of fabulousness with everyone fussing over you, the publisher sending cars to pick you up and flowers in your hotel room. But you also know that it’s not real.
What’s real is sitting in the coffee shop with your computer every day from
1
p.m. to 5 p.m., and then going home and figuring out what’s for dinner, talking to your child and that kind of thing. That’s the thing about Susan Isaacs for me—she was never like a Tama Janowitz–Andy Warhol party girl. She was a writer, but she was also a wife and a mother and she had this nice sort of life. That’s what I wanted.”

Jennifer
Weiner graduated from not-so-déclassé Princeton University in 1991, where she had been a co-founder of the Committee to Coeducate Eating Clubs (a successful mission to allow women into the all-male eating clubs). “I felt like a freak at Princeton,” she said. “It looked like an Abercrombie and Fitch ad and this was a problem. My whole life I was sort of the lonely, outcast, nerdy bookworm, and my parents would say, ‘Just wait until college, you’ll find people like you and you’ll blossom.’ My parents went to the University of Michigan—that might have worked for me with 25,000 undergraduates. But at Princeton it was all very preppy and beautiful people and …. ” She shrugged.

After
college, she applied to small newspapers, ending up at the Centre Daily Times in State College, Penn.

“I
interviewed to be a fact-checker at The New Yorker and didn’t get it,” she said. “One of my professors was an advocate of newspapers—he told me I’d learn a lot, get to meet all sorts of people, and get to write all kinds of stories and get taken out of my comfort zone. It was excellent advice. I wrote two or three stories a day and it taught me about deadlines, being edited and, most importantly, how to tell a story.” The Daily Times led Ms. Weiner to another newspaper, Kentucky’s Lexington Herald-Leader, and then to The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1995, where she wrote about everything from the Democratic National Convention to a Pillsbury bake-off. Things were going great, with posh freelance jobs at Mademoiselle and Salon. But in 1998, after a bad breakup (but of course!), the seeds for Good in Bed were sown and Ms. Weiner’s life started to take the path of, well, a chick-lit character.

“I
was in the whole I have wasted the best years of my life thing and I wanted desperately to get back together with him. It was sick and pathetic,” she said.
“I thought to myself, ‘O.K., I know how to tell a story, so I’m going to tell a story about a girl like me, and I’m going to give her a happy ending because that’s going to make me feel better about everything that’s been going on.’”

‘Real
Fat’ Vs. ‘Hollywood Fat’

It
took a year to write Good in Bed, which features Cannie Shapiro, a spunky plus-size character who has just discovered a column written by her ex-boyfriend in a national woman’s magazine titled “Loving a Larger Woman.”
By
the time Ms. Weiner was finished with what had started out as a feel-better project, she was indeed feeling much better. She bought a guide to literary agents. “This is how I do things, very orderly,” she said. “I made a list of 25 agents and wrote each a query letter. I literally got 24 rejection letters soon after.” One agent Ms.
Weiner declined to name agreed to represent her. “But she wanted me to not have the heroine be fat—because ‘No one wants to read about fat people’ and she told me I’d never sell the movie rights. I didn’t really care about the film rights.
I remember thinking, ‘Cannie’s weight is the plight of the whole book, and if I take it out she’s just Bridget Jones at a bat mitzvah!”

Ms.
Weiner parted from the agency and Good in Bed found its way into the hands of Joanna Pulcini, who had recently left a literary agency to begin her own firm. “I read it over a weekend,” said Ms. Pulcini. “In terms of body image, and in terms of my feelings about my own empowerment as a woman, and how I embrace who I am and what I look like …. I was just profoundly moved by that book.”

Good
in Bed sold at auction to Pocket Books, a branch of Simon & Schuster, for a reported mid-six figures. Ms. Weiner’s second novel, In Her Shoes, which tackles the complex relationship between very different sisters, was sold to Fox 2000 before it was even published, with her younger brother Jake acting as her film manager. Before you could say “chick lit to chick flick,” Cameron Diaz took the role of the beautiful-yet-troubled Maggie, Toni Collette signed on as the responsible-yet-frumpy older sister Rose, and Shirley MacLaine agreed to play their grandmother. Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) was tapped to adapt the book for the screen, with Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys) directing.

“A
simply wonderful film—one of the best in years,” raved Liz Smith after an early screening. “There isn’t a misstep in it.”

“I
saw the movie for the first time in Los Angeles with a bunch of the big suits,”
Ms. Weiner said. “I just kept thinking, Don’t make a fool of yourself, don’t make a fool of yourself. The 20th Century Fox logo came on screen and I burst into tears. I grabbed this big-shot producer by the arm and tearily said, ‘That part came out really good.’”

Of
course, faithful readers of the book may be slightly disturbed when they discover that Toni Collette, while a fantastic actress, is more “not a size 4”
than actually plus-size. “Believe it or not, she gained 25 pounds for that role,” Ms. Weiner said. “It’s hard to think of actresses to play Rose, which is a sad statement about Hollywood. There’s ‘real fat’ and ‘Hollywood fat.’ I’m doing what I can, and I think as I keep working I’ll have more control over things and be able to say ‘Bigger!’”

As
lunch in the City of Brotherly Love wound down, Ms. Weiner asked the waiter to wrap up some leftover lobster fried rice to bring home to her husband. She was readying herself for a national tour to promote the paperback edition of Little Earthquakes, and she still has to figure out what to wear on the red carpet for the Hollywood premiere of In Her Shoes (“I’m so going to make an ass of myself,” she predicted), all before the publicity machine cranks up again for the publication of Goodnight Nobody. This one will star New Yorker Kate Klein, a full-figured (of course) recent transplant to the ’burbs who discovers things in “her pretty little town aren’t as perfect as they seem,” as the publisher put it, “and that soon she’ll be fighting crime while her kids are in nursery school.” Move over, Desperate Housewives!

In
her spare time, Ms. Weiner champions the cause of chick lit for the common woman. “I grew up reading Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz and those escapist, very-beautiful-very-glamorous-women-making-her-way-in-the-world books, and those are great,” she said. “But I also think there needs to be stories a little more realistic and certainly more accessible. I think there’s a place in the world for stories like mine, and hopefully there’s a place in the world for movies like mine, too.” She grinned, flashing back to her girl-reporter days.
“And that’s the scoop.”

"The more I think about the review," Ms. Weiner continued on her Web site, "the more I think about the increasingly angry divide between ladies who write literature and chicks who write chick lit, the more it seems like a grown-up version of the smart versus pretty games of years ago; like so much jockeying for position in the cafeteria and mocking the girls who are nerdier/sluttier/stupider than you, to make yourself feel more secure about your own place in the pecking order."

When asked if she'd heard from Ms. Sittenfeld since she'd aired her grievances, Ms. Weiner laughed. "Oh no. I think I'm far too déclassé for her to even admit knowing about," she said. "It's not a feud. I feel bad that I'm angry about the review and talking about it publicly, but I just feel that what she did doesn't serve the cause of women writing. On my Web log, I said that the review seemed to me to be more about her own anxiety of what people think of her book-so it ended up being an 800-word exercise in showing how smart she is. It's like we know you went to Stanford, we know you won the Seventeen fiction contest when you were 16, because every single article I've read about you manages to get that in there." (Ms. Sittenfeld declined to comment for this article.)

The labeling of certain types of female-written fiction as chick lit is a successful marketing phenomenon that many authors see as semi-derogatory. The backlash is palpable: Random House has plans to publish an anthology entitled This Is Not Chick Lit: A Collection of Original Stories by America's Best Women Writers, which will include work by Ms. Sittenfeld as well as Francine Prose, Myla Goldberg and Jennifer Eagan among others. "The best of women authors? I don't recall voting in that contest," Ms. Weiner said with another laugh. "I think the general understanding is that any book with a young heroine dealing with a dysfunctional family, romantic issues or family trauma is now considered chick lit. It's an easy way to throw them into one category and dismiss them. I felt like the review was making an argument that anyone that writes that kind of book is a child of a lesser literary god.

"I do think there's a component of sexism at work," Ms. Weiner continued. "It's like if a young woman writes it, then it's chick lit. We don't care if she's slaying vampires or working as a nanny or living in Philadelphia. It's chick lit, so who cares? You know what we call what men write? Books."

A Philadelphia Story

Deep in the underbelly of the Javits Center during last month's big Book Expo America fair, the line to meet Ms. Weiner snaked along the corridor. A menagerie of women of varying ages, sizes and styles of dress (and the occasional foot-shuffling male) approached the 35-year-old zaftig-by–New York–standards novelist as she perched atop a stool in a light knitted top and khaki slacks. She was busily signing the new paperback edition of Little Earthquakes, her third best-selling novel, which had followed in quick succession after 2001's Good in Bed and 2002's In Her Shoes. The sum total of her oeuvre has sold over four million copies.

"Women react to her books the way kids react to Harry Potter," said a member of "Team Weiner."

"I'm Barbara," said a young woman in thick glasses, handing over a book to be signed. "Good in Bed changed my life. Changed it!"

"I'm so glad to hear that," Ms. Weiner replied warmly, as she would again and again for the next 30 minutes.

Most signees fell into predictable categories: If they didn't mention one of the book's life-changing properties, they wondered when they could expect the next novel (Goodnight Nobody will come out in September) or when they could see the film version of In Her Shoes starring Cameron Diaz, Toni Collette and Shirley MacLaine (October). But they all approached the table with a notable lack of intimidation-most of the women leaning into the table conspiratorially, chatting as if with an old friend.

"Jennifer, we were the first to know you were pregnant," announced a bookseller from Ms. Weiner's adopted hometown of Philadelphia.

"Oh, hi! It's so nice to see you when I'm not nauseous," Ms. Weiner replied.

A few weeks later at a pan-Asian restaurant in the Society Hill neighborhood of Philly, Ms. Weiner was trying to sell a reporter on the idea that her quaint, cobblestoned surroundings made for a sort of sixth borough. "I love visiting New York," she said. "I love it all-the shopping, the energy, the everything. But then when I get to leave … ," she trailed off, letting out a big contented sigh. "I think if you are in New York or Los Angeles, you have to kind of 'make the scene' and pal around the city with other writers. I can see how you get caught up in it. I think there's a lot of anxiety and competitiveness going on-let's face it, writers are all nuts. I'm just happier living in a normal place and having friends with real jobs."

She lives quietly in this "normal place" with her husband of four years, a lawyer named Adam Bonin, and a 2-year-old daughter, Lucy.   "I loved coming to the Book Expo," she said. "It's a taste of fabulousness with everyone fussing over you, the publisher sending cars to pick you up and flowers in your hotel room. But you also know that it's not real. What's real is sitting in the coffee shop with your computer every day from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., and then going home and figuring out what's for dinner, talking to your child and that kind of thing. That's the thing about Susan Isaacs for me-she was never like a Tama Janowitz–Andy Warhol party girl. She was a writer, but she was also a wife and a mother and she had this nice sort of life. That's what I wanted."

Jennifer Weiner graduated from not-so-déclassé Princeton University in 1991, where she had been a co-founder of the Committee to Coeducate Eating Clubs (a successful mission to allow women into the all-male eating clubs). "I felt like a freak at Princeton," she said. "It looked like an Abercrombie and Fitch ad and this was a problem. My whole life I was sort of the lonely, outcast, nerdy bookworm, and my parents would say, 'Just wait until college, you'll find people like you and you'll blossom.' My parents went to the University of Michigan-that might have worked for me with 25,000 undergraduates. But at Princeton it was all very preppy and beautiful people and …. " She shrugged.

After college, she applied to small newspapers, ending up at the Centre Daily Times in State College, Penn.

"I interviewed to be a fact-checker at The New Yorker and didn't get it," she said. "One of my professors was an advocate of newspapers-he told me I'd learn a lot, get to meet all sorts of people, and get to write all kinds of stories and get taken out of my comfort zone. It was excellent advice. I wrote two or three stories a day and it taught me about deadlines, being edited and, most importantly, how to tell a story." The Daily Times led Ms. Weiner to another newspaper, Kentucky's Lexington Herald-Leader, and then to The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1995, where she wrote about everything from the Democratic National Convention to a Pillsbury bake-off. Things were going great, with posh freelance jobs at Mademoiselle and Salon. But in 1998, after a bad breakup (but of course!), the seeds for Good in Bed were sown and Ms. Weiner's life started to take the path of, well, a chick-lit character.

"I was in the whole I have wasted the best years of my life thing and I wanted desperately to get back together with him. It was sick and pathetic," she said. "I thought to myself, 'O.K., I know how to tell a story, so I'm going to tell a story about a girl like me, and I'm going to give her a happy ending because that's going to make me feel better about everything that's been going on.'"

'Real Fat' Vs. 'Hollywood Fat'

It took a year to write Good in Bed, which features Cannie Shapiro, a spunky plus-size character who has just discovered a column written by her ex-boyfriend in a national woman's magazine titled "Loving a Larger Woman." By the time Ms. Weiner was finished with what had started out as a feel-better project, she was indeed feeling much better. She bought a guide to literary agents. "This is how I do things, very orderly," she said. "I made a list of 25 agents and wrote each a query letter. I literally got 24 rejection letters soon after." One agent Ms. Weiner declined to name agreed to represent her. "But she wanted me to not have the heroine be fat-because 'No one wants to read about fat people' and she told me I'd never sell the movie rights. I didn't really care about the film rights. I remember thinking, 'Cannie's weight is the plight of the whole book, and if I take it out she's just Bridget Jones at a bat mitzvah!"

Ms. Weiner parted from the agency and Good in Bed found its way into the hands of Joanna Pulcini, who had recently left a literary agency to begin her own firm. "I read it over a weekend," said Ms. Pulcini. "In terms of body image, and in terms of my feelings about my own empowerment as a woman, and how I embrace who I am and what I look like …. I was just profoundly moved by that book."

Good in Bed sold at auction to Pocket Books, a branch of Simon & Schuster, for a reported mid-six figures. Ms. Weiner's second novel, In Her Shoes, which tackles the complex relationship between very different sisters, was sold to Fox 2000 before it was even published, with her younger brother Jake acting as her film manager. Before you could say "chick lit to chick flick," Cameron Diaz took the role of the beautiful-yet-troubled Maggie, Toni Collette signed on as the responsible-yet-frumpy older sister Rose, and Shirley MacLaine agreed to play their grandmother. Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich) was tapped to adapt the book for the screen, with Curtis Hanson (L.A. Confidential, Wonder Boys) directing.

"A simply wonderful film-one of the best in years," raved Liz Smith after an early screening. "There isn't a misstep in it."

"I saw the movie for the first time in Los Angeles with a bunch of the big suits," Ms. Weiner said. "I just kept thinking, Don't make a fool of yourself, don't make a fool of yourself. The 20th Century Fox logo came on screen and I burst into tears. I grabbed this big-shot producer by the arm and tearily said, 'That part came out really good.'"

Of course, faithful readers of the book may be slightly disturbed when they discover that Toni Collette, while a fantastic actress, is more "not a size 4" than actually plus-size. "Believe it or not, she gained 25 pounds for that role," Ms. Weiner said. "It's hard to think of actresses to play Rose, which is a sad statement about Hollywood. There's 'real fat' and 'Hollywood fat.' I'm doing what I can, and I think as I keep working I'll have more control over things and be able to say 'Bigger!'"

As lunch in the City of Brotherly Love wound down, Ms. Weiner asked the waiter to wrap up some leftover lobster fried rice to bring home to her husband. She was readying herself for a national tour to promote the paperback edition of Little Earthquakes, and she still has to figure out what to wear on the red carpet for the Hollywood premiere of In Her Shoes ("I'm so going to make an ass of myself," she predicted), all before the publicity machine cranks up again for the publication of Goodnight Nobody. This one will star New Yorker Kate Klein, a full-figured (of course) recent transplant to the 'burbs who discovers things in "her pretty little town aren't as perfect as they seem," as the publisher put it, "and that soon she'll be fighting crime while her kids are in nursery school." Move over, Desperate Housewives!

In her spare time, Ms. Weiner champions the cause of chick lit for the common woman. "I grew up reading Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz and those escapist, very-beautiful-very-glamorous-women-making-her-way-in-the-world books, and those are great," she said. "But I also think there needs to be stories a little more realistic and certainly more accessible. I think there's a place in the world for stories like mine, and hopefully there's a place in the world for movies like mine, too." She grinned, flashing back to her girl-reporter days. "And that's the scoop."

Yo, prep-school papa! You with the gray hair and rueful smile, dropping your little bundle of neuroses off at her boarding school after the long Christmas break. You think no one was watching? You think no one saw how you jumped on the cell to your mistress before you were even down the cobblestone drive? Think again. Could be that a gimlet-eyed novelist posing as a 14-year-old student was checking out your every move.

Not that parents are the only ones who land under the feverishly microscopic lens of Curtis Sittenfeld, now all grown up, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of a big-buzz debut novel, Prep. Also in her sights is a newbie teacher who comes in for a compassionate drubbing because she has the misfortune to sport a frumpy accessory. An overweight classmate falls into empathetic disfavor not because of the extra poundage, but because she feels more secure than she has a right to. The smirkiness of another classmate is kindly judged to be only skin-deep: Her smugness was "like the earth's crust; once you got below it, she was strangely innocent."

Clearly, the narrator of Prep is incapable of missing a trick. Fresh from Nowhere Indiana, trying desperately to blend into the woodwork of her exclusive Massachusetts boarding school, Lee Fiora is the last person you'd expect to be able to see through appearances. (In real life, the author hails from Cincinnati-which makes sense. Ever notice how Ohio girls are the ones most enamored of the East Coast? Victims of the so-near-yet-so-far syndrome.) Unwealthy, awkward, obsessively attuned, Lee is inexperienced with taxis, can't pronounce "Greenwich," doesn't know Bob Dylan from Bob Marley; she's a Hoosier hick whose dad wears mismatched khakis (and is the more pitifully lovable for it). But it's precisely because she's a fish out of water that she's so keenly perceptive. As another writer from the provinces, John Updike, once said of his early stint writing "Talk of the Town" pieces for The New Yorker, who else but someone from the sticks would come up with the freshest, most urbane vignettes?

So it's a coming-of-age story as we watch Lee come to terms-or, more accurately, as she watches herself, with at least as much of the unsparing honesty she trains on her peers. At first we're impatient with how young it all is-must we be subjected to the unchallenging observations of a freshman who believes boys have an easier time being happy than girls?-but soon enough we're charmed by her trials. Intimidated by people with august middle names, lacking the "animal intuition" of her mates to play Madonna with the speakers facing out toward the courtyard-to be, in a word, cool-she suffers a loneliness that's almost magical: She believes that if her woe is intense enough, it will "magnetically draw a handsome boy to her room to comfort [her]." Of course, what comforts us is our understanding that her sense of inadequacy bodes well for her future-that it's a gift which will someday lead her to write the hard-won book we hold in our hands.

But not yet. First Lee has to work her way through that peculiar mix of distrust and disorientation that is the teenage outcast's lot. Rarely has the purgatory of prep-school privilege been spelled out in such excruciating, subtle detail. Because she lacks the most cherished of high-school attributes-the instinct to be breezy-Lee constantly questions her place in the world. She learns that fitting in is a more complicated matter than merely laughing at jokes she doesn't find funny ("it was an act of aggression not to"). Like an iceberg, 90 percent of her thought process is not visible to outsiders; unlike an iceberg, she's surprisingly warm to the touch.

Which brings us to boys. Ah, boys. It goes without saying that Lee is so clueless about the opposition-teenage boys who seem predatory one minute and tender the next-that she longs for the humblest sign of acceptance, even if it's only the "almost compliment" of having a guy call her by her last name. By her lights, she excels only at falling short, in algebra as in her love life, so that the very idea of sex leaves her "almost terrified, with hope."

All the better, then, when sex of a sort arrives and is subjected to the same rigorous examination as everything else. Her first kiss "was harder work than I had imagined, and less immediately pleasing. In fact, it felt intriguing more than enjoyable-the shifting, overlapping wet and dry parts of our mouths and faces, the mild sourness of his mouth … and also the way it was hard not to be conscious of the moment as it happened, not to want to pause and acknowledge it, even if only by laughing. I didn't find kissing funny, but it didn't seem that serious, either, not as serious as we were acting like it was."

Fast-forward to a blowjob. (Well, she does.) Surely Lee isn't the first preppie to suggest that the discomfort of giving one confers "a sort of nobility-a kinship with all the girls who'd done this before." But she may be the first to admit to "an affection for myself for being willing to do it." It's one of the reasons we come to be so fond of Lee and, by extension, Ms. Sittenfeld.

(Have I been getting the two mixed up? Blame the publisher, who made the questionable decision to send out press materials that feature photos of Ms. Sittenfeld's real-life Groton School junior class, and even of her heartthrob-presumably the recipient of her oral largesse.)

Throughout Prep, everyday schoolgirl angst gets a makeover from the setting: The stained-glass windows of chapel lend a "tinge of nobility and glamour to even the most pedestrian kind of homesickness." And compassion works its soft-touch magic: To win favor, Lee rather pathetically gives her classmates complimentary haircuts and finds herself acutely conscious of how "warm and vulnerable" their oblivious heads feel; she struggles all through the novel to feel for them a "true and continuous sympathy instead of mere intermittent pangs." So it's with regret that we wonder why Ms. Sittenfeld ultimately allows her narrator to buy into the snobbery that torments her, first by cruelly giving a potential suitor the back of her hand simply because he is "LMC" (lower middle class-part of the kitchen staff), and finally by learning to regard everyone back in South Bend with disdain (they "were fat, or wore brown ties, or seemed to be in bad moods)." Are we supposed to cheer when she's at last achieved this level of priggishness?

In the end, Lee is liberated by graduation and the realization that the pond is a lot bigger than it's been for the past four years. But she's sad, too-and so are we. Perhaps it's the knowledge that the pond is not all that much bigger, that life in the wide world is in many ways prep school writ large, and that she'll need every one of the protective talents she's honed-not just for the near future, but for the rest of her life, as well. In which case, may I be permitted an upperclassmen's well-meaning word of advice? Keep the gimlet eye, kiddo, but lose the snobbery. With heart and talent like yours, it's beneath you.

Daniel Asa Rose reviews books regularly for The Observer.