Elizabeth Merrick Writes Like a Girly

Elizabeth Merrick, founder of New York's Grace Reading Series (and co-founder of its beloved predecessor, the Cupcake Reading Series), has decided to take on chick lit with some lit of her own. Her first novel, Girly, will hit shelves December 13, and Ms. Merrick promises prose about women who are neither shoe-buying psychos nor velvet rope-jumping queens.

Girly is the story of Racinda Hart, a woman who has survived both a fundamentalist Christian upbringing and a dangerously wild older sister, Ruth. Racinda's journey to discover the truth about her mother and her grandmother--and to find the gone-missing Ruth--brings her from rural Pennsylvania to rock and roll California, with plenty of real plot and prose along the way.

Elizabeth Merrick has long been an advocate of women in fiction, co-founding the Cupcake Reading Series and founding the Grace Reading Series in New York to give female writers a regular venue to read work. She is also the editor of upcoming anthology This is Not Chick Lit (Random House), a book so controversial that a counter-anthology has already been planned with the title This is Chick Lit.

In a recent interview, Ms. Merrick commented, "Girly is all those vast amazing parts of women's voices that are still emerging, those bits of ourselves that we’re still hiding in our hearts and that hold all our brilliance....Boys might not be so into Girly but that’s okay. My next book is about monster truck rallies so I’ll get to the boys soon."

Girly will be published by Demimonde Books.

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