Stuck at the airport: a guide to finding the public intellectual in popular fiction

Abstract

It's happened to all of us. You’re tired, you’re at the airport when suddenly, the dreaded announcement – your flight’s been delayed by four hours. So you head to the bookstore. You know that you should go for the Booker-prize winning novel. But it’s the literary equivalent of Weet-bix, and you’re craving the chocolate crosissant. You want the courtroom drama. You want the sci-fi fantasy. Not Meeting Right by Anita Heiss gives you both. It’s an easy, lightweight read. But don’t let that fool you. Heiss’ chick lit is unmistakably, and pointedly political – and that’s her goal: she uses chick lit to write the experience of women like her, women who are young, urban and Aboriginal, into the consciousness of mainstream, non-Aboriginal Australia.