Long-Suffering Professional Females: The Case of Nanny Lit

Abstract

A relatively recent branch of chick-lit, known as "underling-lit" or "assistant-lit," focuses on young women, usually recent college graduates from comfortable and cultured backgrounds, and their uneasy entrance into the culture of the professional workplace. In these works, the iniquities of disagreeable employers are revealed and the lunacies of bureaucratic systems are exposed. The suffering and superior knowledge of the narrator heroine is ultimately rewarded by removal from the bad workplace, and the discovery of a new, far more suitable career. Such literature belies its frothy packaging. On the cover, the heroine may be a stalky-legged, martini-clutching silhouette; in the pages of the novel, she mutates into a disheveled, wild-eyed, self-righteous narrator with a victim mentality who informs the reader of every slight she received during the course of working for the horrific boss whose antics supply much of the novel's material.