quit lit

It began with chick lit in the late 1980s, the jokey name for the romantic fiction that women liked to read.  After that there was a regular succession of varieties of lit (as in ‘literary genre’) such as gangsta lit (books about life on the streets in the US), grit lit (fiction and non-fiction about the hardships of life), sick lit (stories for young people about terminal illness and suicide), and up lit (uplifting stories).  But the passion for combining lit with some identifier in a slick and catchy way seemed to fade.

Now we have quit lit which is the genre of writing that focuses on the sober-serious (blogged here last year) and the techniques and practices that allowed them to become so.

The readers of quit lit have come to the realisation that, while they are not necessarily abusing alcohol to extremes, well — not all the time, they feel that the drink is governing their lives more than they like, and suspect that they might regain control and physically feel better if they stopped drinking.  This is part of the health and wellbeing push so it differs from the AA approach to addicts who are regarded as having a disease that they will fight all their lives. Mostly the readers and writers are women who see themselves as falling victim to a society where the heavy consumption of alcohol is the norm.