Why We Loved Sophie Kinsella, the Author of the I Love Shopping Series Who Passed Away Today at 56

Between the late '90s and the beginning of the new millennium, the heroines of romantic literature were three: Bridget, Becky, and Andy. Less lovesick and tearful, perpetually scurrying on more or less high heels between offices in New York skyscrapers or the City, these three characters redefined romantic comedy in books and film. With them, an idealized, yes, but tough career entered the romantic dream, made of hard work and competition, leading to professional recognition even before finding a soulmate. It's a shift in focus and ambition that led to coining the term chick lit (literature for young women), more agile and irreverent than a genre whose romanticism and heroines had become a bit dusty and unsuitable for inspiring generations of readers.

The first jolt, needless to say, came from the English Bridget Jones, an imperfect and utterly chaotic production assistant involved in an eternal tug-of-war between two men who love her and, upon closer inspection, are as imperfect as she is. In 2000, she arrived, Becky Bloomwood, the character who transformed Madeleine Sophie Wickham into Sophie Kinsella, a writer with tens of millions of copies sold, beloved by her readers but also becoming an example of literature so fast-paced and consumable that it took on the characteristics of industrial production.

The Explosion of the Chick Lit Phenomenon and I Love Shopping

As often happens, the success of a saga and a character overshadowed what came before in the eyes of the general public: years in which Wickham wrote and published her first editorial works, building a solid career in popular literature but far from the speed and frivolity of I Love Shopping.

Born in London in 1969 into a "good" family, with an impeccable education in politics, philosophy, and music at New College, Oxford, the future Kinsella was bored for years in the role of a financial journalist. Perhaps to escape a job she found unstimulating and repetitive, she began her prolific writing career, gaining considerable success under her own name in terms of critical and public reception. Her first novel was A che gioco giochiamo? (The Tennis Party), published in 1995, when she was only 24. More comedic than romantic, more composed and reflective than her later lively works, A che gioco giochiamo? is nevertheless already centered on the theme of money as a measure of success and happiness.

The novel stably launched Wickham into the publishing world at a very young age. Wickham, who tells of four couples of friends who meet for a weekend and inevitably end up measuring their personal and romantic fulfillment. She is not lacking in experience: she has already firmly established her own couple's life. Her university friend became her husband when she was only twenty-one. He is the great love of her life, with whom she would build a large family, with five children.

After a long string of novels published annually, she decided to challenge herself with a more brilliant and lighter book, with a very fast pace and even a frivolous subject. Perhaps for this reason, she chose to present it to her publisher under a pseudonym, using her mother's maiden name, Kinsella. A traditional move, all things considered, for a woman who, not yet forty, swept the publishing world and became a sales giant with the I Love Shopping saga.

Becky, the Heroine of Pre-Crisis Fashionistas

With her stable marriage, many children, and impeccable education, one might wonder where Becky Bloomwood came from, her most beloved heroine, but whose life was diametrically opposed to that of her writer. As much as Sophie was accomplished in the traditional sense for a young English woman, Becky struggled through a frivolous, glittering, chaotic life, with a somewhat capricious and childish approach.

These were the years of the fashionistas who, before the great crisis of 2008, marked a new peak in consumption and consumer culture. Along with Carrie Bradshaw of Sex & the City, Becky is the most convinced supporter of the therapeutic power of shopping, addicted to brands and fashion and cosmetic purchases. Indeed, to being a shopaholic: obsessed with the thrill of buying something, perhaps on sale, perhaps in that store only you know, regardless of what that something is, without worrying too much about her wallet.

Kinsella herself made the term shopaholic famous, transforming a lucky hit in bookstores into a multi-million dollar franchise with tenacity and productivity, publishing in rapid succession a series of novels in which Becky "loves shopping" in many facets and circumstances: I Love Shopping in New York, I Love Shopping in White, I Love Shopping with My Sister, I Love Shopping for Baby, I Love Mini Shopping, I Love Shopping in Hollywood, I Love Shopping in Venice, I Love Shopping in Las Vegas, I Love Shopping at Christmas.

In a sense, Kinsella also anticipated the new Hollywood turn of rigidly codified franchises, writing ten novels (interspersed with other works) starring Becky in less than twenty years, who changes enough – from sister to wife to mother, with occasional trips – to justify a new book, without ever giving readers anything radically different. Industrial novels, with the repetition of the same pattern with minimal variations, "cookie-cutter," critics say.

The Economic Crisis and the Crisis of Romantic Comedy

Of course, the rapid and global success of I Love Shopping also contributed to giving a derogatory meaning to the term chick lit, which with the economic crisis and the crisis of romantic comedy became synonymous with heroines imperfect in their frivolity and superficiality, linked to an irrevocably concluded era. An era of which millions of copies of novels consumed with avidity and enthusiasm by their public remain.

While she defined the canons of a modern literary franchise even before Hollywood managed to do so in cinema, cinema appropriated the novels of her most famous colleagues, transforming them into two genre classics like Bridget Jones's Diary and The Devil Wears Prada. It took a few more years to bring Becky to the big screen: Confessions of a Shopaholic arrived in theaters only in 2009, based on the first two novels in the series, starring Becky Bloomwood played by an enchanting Isla Fisher, flanked by a grumpy but caring Hugh Dancy as the man who would cure her, at least in part, of her shopping frenzy.

It was already too late: the economic crisis had erupted a year earlier, and a film about a woman in love and a spendthrift arrived at the worst possible moment, coinciding with the decline of quality romantic comedy, the kind capable of leaving its mark on pop culture and generating widely consumed films that were also widely appealing. Perhaps the flop of Confessions of a Shopaholic, which never generated the saga that was hoped for despite doing moderately well at the box office, was precisely the first sign of the decline of a genre always much loved by its audience, but which (with sporadic exceptions) lost contact with a broad cross-section of viewers.

So much so that it took ten years to get a second adaptation based on Kinsella's novels: in 2019, it was Can You Keep a Secret?, based on the novel of the same name, starring Emma Corrigan. The duo formed by Alexandra Daddario and Tyler Hoechlin and the direct-to-demand US distribution are the perfect synthesis of the slow but inexorable decline of a genre still popular online, in bookstores, and in the self-publishing sector, but which has rarely worked in cinema. A genre that has left behind its professional heroines of the tertiary sector (journalists, publicists, career women who talk fast and have a very chaotic private life) in favor of other subgenres, archiving that decade of verve and superficiality.

As we perceive it today, unlike how it was then, Bridget, Andy, and Becky brought work to the center of the ambitions and anxieties of the heroines in love, who were finally allowed to be a little less perfect, a little less composed, and even a little more desirous of the simple kiss of the prince charming, in relational and even sensual terms.