Tweet, tweet.

Last week, newly appointed public editor Margaret Sullivan wrote about what she now calls "the insulting and profane Twitter messages" that Times freelancer Andrew Goldman tweeted at author Jennifer Weiner. Ms. Sullivan ended the post by calling for a clear social media policy at the paper of record.

Looks like they are now clearing it up. It is actually fairly simple: don't be a jerk to readers.

"Be thoughtful. Take care that nothing you say online will undercut your credibility as a journalist. Newsroom staff members should avoid editorializing or promoting political views. And we should be civil – even to critics – and avoid personal attacks and offensive remarks," Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, said in a memo. The memo was included in Ms. Sullivan's post today.

"When in doubt, ask yourself if a given action might damage The Times’s reputation. If so, it’s probably a bad idea," Mr. Corbett continued.

And just how does this policy apply to freelancers?

“It would be crazy to try to control freelancers’ behavior night and day,” Mr. Corbett told Ms. Sullivan. But, as the Times standard bearers pointed out readers often don't know the difference between staff writers and freelancers. “So we want them to have the same standards,” Mr. Corebett said.

But the policy isn't new. We heard something similar last week when we reached out to find out if the newspaper was going to change their social media policy.

“We expect New York Times journalists to act like New York Times journalists,” Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy said.

“It has been communicated to Andrew Goldman that his comments on Twitter were not appropriate and not in keeping with The Times’s long-standing principle that we expect our journalists to behave as thoughtfully on social media as they do in other aspects of their jobs,”added Ms. Murphy, in an email last week.

But ultimately, it is all up to the Times, Ms. Sullivan points out.

"And unstated is the simple truth that The Times has the upper hand here. It decides, often on a case-by-case basis, which freelancers to assign. Assessing their judgment on social media is very likely to be a part of that decision-making."

"Particularly in the wake of Mr. Goldman’s display of poor judgment, it’s good to see the guidelines reinforced," the public editor writes.

The Tweets that started it all. (Screenshot from Galleycat).

Bestselling novelist Jennifer Weiner started a Twitter fight with New York Times writer Andrew Goldman after she read his "Talk" feature in the Sunday magazine. Mr. Goldman asked actress Tippi Hedren,  the star of The Birds and the subject of a new HBO movie about her relationship with Alfred Hitchcock, if she had ever been tempted to help her career along by having sex with directors. Ms. Weiner tweeted "Saturday am. Iced coffee. NYT mag. See which actress Andrew Goldman has accused of sleeping her way to the top. #traditionsicoulddowithout." 

Mr. Goldman tweeted in response "@jenniferweiner sensing pattern. Little Freud in me thinks you would have liked at least to have had opportunity to sleep way to top




." The fight escalated from there, with other writers weighing in.

Today, Margaret Sullivan, the Times' new public editor, wrote about it.

But before Mr. Goldman got in a twitter war with Ms. Weiner, before he interviewed Ms. Hedren, before he was taken to task by Ms. Sullivan, Mr. Goldman was asking all sorts of inappropriate questions in Elle. Mr. Goldman spent eight years interviewing male celebrities about their dating lives and attitudes towards women for his column "cherchez la femme."

Some of our favorites:

Sean “P Diddy” Combs
ELLE: Before he married Demi Moore, Ashton Kutcher once suggested to me that some mindblowingly debauched sexual stuff went on while he was hanging with you—it seemed to involve having sex with women while in the same room. What's your rule of thumb about that?
Bret Michaels
ELLE: Do you think there's a relationship between a woman's looks and sexual skills?
Michael Keaton
ELLE: Imagine you had only 10 seconds to prepare a girlfriend to meet your late mother. What would you tell her?
Matthew McConaughey
ELLE: Did you have any odd misunderstandings about human sexuality as a kid?
Bill Maher
ELLE: Please speculate on the lovemaking styles of fellow broadcasters Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity.
Kyle MacLachlan
ELLE: In Sex and the City, you played a guy who was only able to perform sexually in public places, like cabs and coatrooms. Have you found that there are any odd places that make you amorous?

But of course, Mr. Goldman's mistake was not really asking the question. (About that, reasonable minds can disagree.) It was his Twitter reply to Ms. Weiner.

"We expect New York Times journalists to act like New York Times journalists," Times spokesperson Eileen Murphy said when we inquired the social media policy at the newspaper.

"It has been communicated to Andrew Goldman that his comments on Twitter were not appropriate and not in keeping with The Times’s long-standing principle that we expect our journalists to behave as thoughtfully on social media as they do in other aspects of their jobs," Ms. Murphy added in an email.

"I'm so sorry but I really can't talk about it," Mr. Goldman said via email. He has, of course, deleted his Twitter profile.

"Jeffrey Eugenides doesn't have a book out this summer," says the ad, styled to look like the Times Square The Marriage Plot billboard that FSG shelled out for, "but Jennifer Weiner has... The Next Best Thing."

The Next Best Thing is the title of the book, misogynists.

Who do you think wore the vest better?

Once inside, they stood shoulder-to-shoulder, sipping beers, while New York Times reporter Amy O’Leary asked a panel of editors and writers to talk about moxie.

Why was it, Ms. O’Leary wondered, that as a young freelancer she had spent months refining every pitch while her male peers tossed off story proposals from every statistic or idea they encountered?

“You have to understand that rejection is part of the process,” Times metro editor Carolyn Ryan said. “It really is part of the engagement with ideas.”

Ms. O’Leary’s younger self would have worried that one bad pitch could get her blacklisted from editors’ inboxes.

“You’re not going to remember in a pejorative way someone who’s just eager,” Ms. Ryan said. “We have a reporter at our paper, Sarah Maslin Nir—she was a lunatic when it came to pitching. She was relentless.” (After freelancing across 11 sections, Ms. Maslin Nir was hired full time.)

Attendees jotted it all down in notebooks made by Muji and Moleskine.

The event was put on by “female nonfiction storytellers” group Her Girl Friday, but a handful of men dotted the crowd, either in solidarity or simply sensing a networking or hook-up opportunity. The mood alternated between J-school seminar and group therapy session (even The Observer found herself involuntarily pumping her fist as panelist Katherine Lanpher cried, “No is a bump on the road to yes!”), but the evening’s mission seemed grander.

“This estrogen halo in this room—it’s really wonderful, it’s really powerful,” said Ms. Lanpher, a public radio host. “But we’re here because those byline counts matter.”

She was referring to the annual tallies put out by The Op-Ed Project, a nonprofit that shepherds women and minority writers onto newspaper op-ed pages, and VIDA, a two-year-old organization for women in the literary arts best known for throwing the wildest party the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference has ever seen. (There were burlesque dancers and roller-derby girls.)

In the last three years, the groups have become a fixture in Manhattan media circles for their end-of-year counts, which distill the nebulous boys-clubbiness of publications like The New York Times and The New Yorker into easily rebloggable bar graphs and pie charts.

As a result, a conversation previously relegated to once-a-decade university research papers has become an annual media event, a regular and cathartic articulation of a long-running internal monologue.

“We call the count ‘The Count’ from our experience of quietly counting to ourselves every time we read The New York Times Book Review,” VIDA co-founder Erin Belieu, a poet and professor at Florida State University told The Observer. “We were always looking to see how many and what kinds of books by women are being reviewed.”

In addition to counting female-authored articles, stories and poems, VIDA keeps tabs on the number of books by women reviewed by tastemakers like the London and New York Reviews of Books. Less than 20 percent of the titles reviewed by the NYRB were written by women, a problem novelist Meg Wolitzer wrote about in The New York Times earlier this year.

Ms. Wolitzer told The Observer the statistics had validated a suspicion she and female novelist friends had long shared. “You just had that feeling there was excitement around male work,” she said. “That was something I couldn’t quantify but I felt.”

It’s hardly a new discussion. Katha Pollitt reportedly devoted a Nation column to the problem more than a decade ago. TIME online editor Ruth Davis Konisberg had her own byline count site in the mid-aughts, called Women TK. But for the same reason, VIDA’s numbers are shocking. How is it that in 2012, The Nation (helmed by a woman, Katrina vanden Heuvel, since 1995), is still 73 percent written by men?

There are a couple of theories. The most popular is that women pitch less, or less aggressively, than men. Harper’s editor Ellen Rosenbush said as much when confronted with her dismal statistics, calling the “dearth of female bylines” an “industry-wide issue.”

“When I saw the VIDA counts I thought, I don’t know why that is. I’m not in the right position to theorize,” Ms. O’Leary said. But having mentored young journalists, she knew pitching was a perennial concern, and one piece of the puzzle that could be solved. “I just thought, well, hey, why don’t we do something really practical?”

According to a blog post by former GOOD magazine executive editor Ann Friedman, the gender makeup of a magazine reflects the genders of its editors and their professional networks of writers. Shortly after the first VIDA count, Ms. Friedman started Lady Journos!, a curated feed of quality, nonservice articles and essays written by women, in the hopes of keeping female bylines fresh in the minds of assigning editors.

The token male on Tuesday’s panel, The Atavist founder Evan Ratliff, agreed that editors should take responsibility.

“We have had a really bad gender byline balance,” he said sheepishly. The Atavist, which publishes very long form nonfiction, has only published two pieces by women, out of sixteen total, since it was founded in 2011.

Boos, though polite ones, rose from the crowd.

“I knew I shouldn’t have come here,” he joked.

He explained that after the first two stories The Atavist assigned to women fell through (a total coincidence, he assured the crowd), they never managed to correct the ratio.

“There are a lot of male writers who just have a natural sense of entitlement to them,” Mr. Ratliff said. They just pitch and pitch until something sticks.

“It’s not a question of gender as much as it is a question of who feels entitled to take up the space,” Ms. Lanpher said, pointing out that Wikipedia has no editor and is 75 percent written by men. “They feel they can do that. It’s really not an ovary thing.”

With Jill Abramson at the top of The Times and Tina Brown at the top of Newsweek, it’s easy to forget that the publications were embroiled in landmark gender discrimination cases as recently as 1978 and 1970, respectively.

“The system at Newsweek was women researched and men wrote,” Gloria Steinem recalled at Monday night’s Women’s Media Center benefit. “It was absolutely airtight. So considering where we started I’m not surprised it’s still a problem.”

Whatever the causes, the gender awareness stoked by the VIDA count has added a new, political layer to the ritual grousing over National Magazine Award nominees. Ms. Friedman divvied up the count by gender this year and found no women had been nominated in prestige categories like feature writing, columns and commentary, essays and criticism, and reporting. (They fared better in the personal service category, home to “Would You Get a ‘Mommy Tuck’?”)

Meanwhile, election news analysis site The 4th Estate found that women contributed just 15 percent of the quotations in political articles in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and even named the worst offenders (will anyone volunteer to introduce Jeff Zeleny and Dan Balz to some chicks?), something VIDA has heretofore avoided.

“Shaming people has never really changed anyone’s mind,” Ms. Belieu explained.

VIDA was born from a viral email manifesto written in August 2009 by Cate Marvin, a poet and professor at the College of Staten Island. The AWP had just rejected a panel she had proposed for its annual conference, on the transgressive in female poetry, and she faced an absurdly large pile of infant laundry to fold. Writing to a handful of writerly friends, she likened herself to the narrator of Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing.”

Ms. Belieu stayed up all night forwarding the email to like-minded women, who flooded Ms. Marvin’s inbox. They were frustrated that the conversation about women in the literary arts had devolved, in Ms. Belieu’s words, into “a retrograde, touchy-feely, moon-goddess-y, groovy” sort of thing.

Ms. Marvin and Ms. Belieu co-founded VIDA in part because, as established poets with professor gigs, they could speak freely about inequality in a way that made full-time poets and fiction writers more anxious.

“You undermine your ‘special woman’ status,” Ms. Belieu said, referring to those, like Louise Glück and Kay Ryan, who have been admitted to the literary boy’s club. “What happens when you go on the record as someone who doesn’t like this club?”

Few know better than Jennifer Weiner, the bestselling Good in Bed author. She has publicly fought the literary establishment on Twitter, even as her massive commercial appeal underwrites her publisher’s more artistic ventures.

Ms. Weiner first called attention to the disproportionate amount of attention paid to male authors in 2010, with the hashtag “Franzenfreude,” which she used to describe The Times and other publications’ slobbering over Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

The keynote speaker at BookExpo America’s Blogger Conference on Monday, Ms. Weiner said her publicist had urged her not to speak out against The Times again, fearing they would take it out on her next novel.

“What else can they do to me?” Ms. Weiner asked. “Can they quote Jonathan Galassi—who is Jonathan Franzen’s editor—making fun of my made-up German? That happened.”

Now Ms. Weiner thinks that The Times may be misrepresenting her book sales. She said that her current paperback, Then Came You, was the eighth-best-selling book on Bookscan, but only ranked 22 on The New York Times Bestsellers List. When her publisher has called to contest her rankings in the past, she said, The Times said it doesn’t disclose its methodology.

In VIDA, there’s a third party that can hold The Times accountable, by one measure, without risking seeming whiny or paranoid.

“What ‘The Count’ is really doing is, whether they like it or not, editors are in a position of having to think about this,” Ms. Belieu said. “The volume just keeps getting louder.”

On June 18, VIDA will make its formal debut in New York literary society—well, Brooklyn literary society, anyway—with a fundraiser thrown by Riverhead Books at Brooklyn Brewery.

“My goal is: Everyone in publishing should be ashamed of themselves if they didn’t go to the VIDA fundraiser,” said Riverhead head of publicity Jynne Martin. (According to a 2011 count produced by The New Republic, Riverhead’s catalog breaks down 45 percent female and 55 percent male, compared with a 30–70 split elsewhere).

The fundraiser will help VIDA fund its first two program goals: creating a network of mentoring workshops and putting together an endowment that will allow it to offer no-questions-asked grants to writers.

“As a writer you’ll often want to apply for these projects and you’ll have to come up with some grand proposal,” Ms. Belieu said. “‘I’m going to go to Italy and study the saints blah blah blah.’ There are very few organizations where you can say ‘I would use the funds for this award to take care of daycare.’”

“It goes back to Virginia Woolf,” Ms. Belieu said, of writing. “You need enough money and you need a room to do it in.”

kstoeffel@observer.com

We compared men to women and then highlighted the authors whose books had been singled out for the one-two punch of a weekday review and a review in the Sunday Times Book Review.

Here's what we found.

Of the 545 books reviewed between June 29, 2008 and Aug. 27, 2010:
-338 were written by men (62 percent of the total)
-207 were written by women (38 percent of the total)

Of the 101 books that received two reviews in that period:
-72 were written by men (71 percent)
-29 were written by women (29 percent)

So the answer is yes, the Times definitely gives more attention to the work of male authors. But Slate states that the stats don't exactly answer questions raised by authors like Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner--questions about whether or not men who tread the same popular fiction waters as Wiener and Picoult (Hornby, Hiaasen, etc.) are just as likely as an author like Jonathan Franzen to get real notice from the NYTBR. Is the Times' alleged bias a matter of gender trumping genre? 

Past the raw data, it's hard to tell. The answer may continue to depend on the sex and station of the person who asks the question.

[Slate]

• Weiner, on why critics seem to ignore commercial fiction: "I think it's a very old and deep-seated double standard that holds that when a man writes about family and feelings, it's literature with a capital L, but when a woman considers the same topics, it's romance, or a beach book - in short, it's something unworthy of a serious critic's attention."
• Picoult, on feeling like her books may have been dismissed or overlooked due to content or the author's gender: "[You] know what? That's your trade off. I think Jen Weiner was the one who tweeted the very comment that, 'I'm going to weep into my royalty check'. She's funny and honest and that's what makes her great. There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success. I don't begrudge the label of 'commercial writer', because I wanted to reach as many readers as I could. I read a lot of commercial fiction and a lot of the same themes and wisdoms I find in commercial fiction are the same themes and wisdoms as what i see lauded in literary fiction."
• Jennifer Weiner, on the Times giving praise and attention to commercially successful authors like Lee Child and Laura Lippman: "The examples you cite reinforce my argument that women are still getting the short end of the stick. If you write thrillers or mysteries or horror fiction or quote-unquote speculative fiction, men might read you, and the Times might notice you. If you write chick lit, and if you're a New Yorker, and if your book becomes the topic of pop-culture fascination, the paper might make dismissive and ignorant mention of your book. If you write romance, forget about it. You'll be lucky if they spell your name right on the bestseller list..."
• Jodi Picoult, addressing the same question from Pinter: "I think those are anomalies more than the norm. But again it is one person's opinion."

Asked why commercial fiction should receive critical notice, Picoult invoked Dickens and Shakespeare, saying books that have "persevered in our culture" were usually popular fiction: "Think about Jane Austen. Think about Charles Dickens. Think about Shakespeare. They were popular authors. They were writing for the masses."

The first part of Weiner's response to Pinter's question about critical attention to popular novels was cutting: "Because, honestly, I think if the NYT cares about its darlings finding a wider audience, the smartest thing it can do is be a little more respectful toward the books readers are actually reading."

[HuffPo]

This time it's novelist Jennifer Weiner, who took to Twitter yesterday afternoon to announce her displeasure at a recent blurb request. It seems an editor sent along a memoir by a writer ("Ms. Hoity-Toity") known to scorn Ms. Weiner's chosen genre, chick lit. And--bad to worse--the editor misspelled Weiner's name. The clues provided thus far:

- Author is an "ex-big-city-book-critic."

- Author "once called all chick-lit writers a pack of pathetic Jay McInerney wannabes."

- Memoir will be released in August.

We are drawing a blank, but that's OK: It's Friday of Memorial Day Weekend and the city already feels awful sleepy--we'll take a blind item. Keep it coming, Weiners of the world.

“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."