Chick Lit Patient Zero: Sheila Levine

Nextbook has a great appreciation piece on Overlook's Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York, the mother of all chick lit books by the brilliant Gail Parent.

Single-girl poster girl Bridget Jones worried, famously, that if she never married—and she was quite sure she wouldn’t—she would wind up meeting her demise "all alone, half-eaten by an Alsatian."

Twenty-six years earlier, Sheila Levine was not about to leave that kind of thing to chance. Gail Parent’s 1973 bestseller Sheila Levine is Dead...and Living in New York is in fact the character's 223-page suicide note. (You know, like The Bell Jar, only funny.) "Well, girls," Sheila writes, "all you Jewish lovelies out there, good news! The competition will be less. Sheila Levine has given up the fight. She is going to die."