SMH at single mum chick lit

Title: Don’t You Want Me?
Author: India Knight
Published: Penguin, November 2011

Years ago, I read Knight’s Life on a Plate and enjoyed it thoroughly as a married woman’s chick lit. More recently, I read Darling, Knight’s take on Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, and enjoyed that too. So I had high hopes of Don’t You Want Me? despite the cringey title.

Stella is a divorced, single mother living in London. She shares a flat with a randy ginger named Frank, who Stella has firmly friendzoned.

It had shades of Mad About the Boy, the third book in the Bridget Jones’s Diary series.

SMH was my reaction to that book and to this one. Can women who have been married and given birth to a child be this silly? After 35, would you, for example, be so desperate for sex that you would sleep with a man you found pathetic?

Also, this idea that not socialising much when one has a young child is somehow abnormal. Stella didn’t seem displeased with her life until Frank points out that she never goes anywhere, and then there’s this whole project to date. Why isn’t it enough to be a single mum with a job?

Then, the novel took the chick lit turn of chronicling a series of bad dates before ending up with The One, who it was obvious right from the get go that she was going to end up with. There is a whole extended conversation in a bar in which she insists Frank explain what makes a woman a “dirty ride”, which I found extremely disingenuous and childish. Like the Bechdel test, there should be one about men and women who cannot have a conversation which is not about sex.

At one point, Frank tells Stella, “You’re like a pretty bloke” and I’m like, ah it’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl with a French twist. Reading this novel soon after Darling, it struck me how for Knight French= good foreign (it turns out Knight is a French speaker who lived in Brussels for a chunk of her life, so this makes sense). Stella is a half-French and this gives her an outsider-insider perspective, but also makes her by definition “not like other girls”.

Part of Stella’s venturing into the wider world is going to a playgroup, where she quickly discovers she can’t stand most of the women and babies there. Why would you go back then? Because Honey, her daughter (and she actually ridicules other children’s names) likes it, she offers lamely at some point, though there were never signs of Honey being very into it. Admittedly, the women and children sound dreadful, but there’s also a fair bit of fat-shaming.

What comes out of the playgroup is a serious friendship, so I was quite shocked with the immaturity with which Stella treated Louisa. Again, it’s like women don’t evolve at all with age.

The idea of the leading man, though, has evolved. He now has to completely hot with an enviable career, but also handy in the kitchen and with (your) children.

Regardless of all this, the chemistry between the two main characters is delicious, and they are overall likeable, so I kept going.