I know I ought to start on Proust. I know that I should attempt Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow one more time. I know that Mrs Dalloway waits as do War and Peace and The Magic Mountain. But my eyes evade their stiff albeit imploring spines and instead settle on Marian Keyes' The Other Side of the Story. When I am done with that, I have Joy Fielding and Joanne Trollope, both filled with many hours of promise…these writers may not ever be reckoned amidst a line of literary stalwarts but you can be sure that they have a million readers more than any literary god....

So for the moment, the day, the week and the month, I have put aside the doyens of angst and the word acrobats, writers who plumb the depths of the human soul or soar to celestial heights. Instead I seek solace and peace in doorstoppers. Fat and fatuous family sagas where almost everything happens the way we expect it to; where black and white overshadows the grey and where good gets its reward and evil its punishment and even if the girl doesn't get the man of her choice, she finds someone who is just as good.… Besides they all have wonderful dialogue, unforgettable characters and plenty of minutiae about food, clothes and everyday life. More than anything else, why I delight in these books is that they celebrate the ordinary and these days we have very little time or media space for that....

I remember the horror I saw on a publisher's face when I said I found Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy rather like an Indian version of Catherine Cookson. "What about An Equal Music?" he asked. "That's literary fiction," I said. "But the other one…it is very much like a Catherine Cookson book. I don't know why you sound so horrified though. I adore her books so you needn't read anything derogatory into it," I added. And I stand by it. The Kirkus Reviews referred to this book as a cream-puff-wrapped-in-a-cinder-block but you can ignore that. What they mean is that it isn't literary enough....

As for the much-maligned-by-literary-types Dame Cookson, she published over 90 highly popular novels which have been translated into several languages. Each one of her books dwells on life as it is and there was no attempt to rise beyond that. And yet, I have found her books the most readable. Perhaps it stems from the fact that the author knew the world she was talking about and she wrote about it from within rather than as an observer. In the end, isn't that what all fiction, literary or otherwise, ought to do: celebrate life rather than denigrate it.

At one time, women's writing was for me a synonym for banal. The very act of opening a book written by women for women seemed an act of drudgery. I would toss my hair, grimace and move on to weighty tomes, hefty with gravitas and much existential angst. Not anymore. Now on my bedside table where once Camus and Kazantzakis reigned, pretty pink volumes with grab-you-by-the-gut titles in loopy writing reside.

But I am not entirely out of the closet yet. There are moments when I feel as though I have gone back to my early teens when I hid my Harold Robbins and Sidney Sheldons amidst the more innocuous Mills & Boon. For when I have guests who may wander into my bedroom, I place a vintage collection of Latin American short stories or a Jeanette Winterson or a Bruce Chatwin on top of the pile....

How do I explain to them the essential feel-good feeling that a volume or two of chick lit by your bedside evokes? That a daily fix works just as well as De-anxit minus the pharmaceutical complications.... I can empathise with the heroine of Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It as she stealthily squashes store-bought mince pies to make it look home-made. I used to go one step further and bake my son a cake religiously every week to compensate for my constant absences. Until the day he told me that he was perhaps the only kid in his class whose mother actually baked a cake herself....

I can see the distinct advantages of being a Maeve Binchy heroine who polishes her silver when troubles come calling and her life falls around her ears….I think the Buddhists refer to it as going with the flow. My own version is to wipe the leaves of the house plants. I feel myself cringe when a protagonist of one of those countless books makes a career faux pas. Never fraternise with the boss. Youthful playfulness is often seen to be as hitting at someone. Particularly if that someone is high up on the power ladder. I know the relief that she feels when, away from home in a strange city, after a night of ‘Strangers In The Night’-induced drunken togetherness, she wakes up in her own bed with a chaste unslept side...

But best of all, I can feel all my competitive sap rise and then surprisingly plateau as the heroine (always the heroine) rushes from one zone to the other in a life full of zones. Mother. Wife. Sister. Daughter. Boss. High Net Employee. Domestic goddess. Siren. Bitch…. The frantic pace of being a chick in a chick lit makes me glad that I am not a chick anymore. I might have lost battles with cellulite, gravity and teenage children. But to compensate there is a certain restfulness that comes from leaning against pillows and sipping my malted milk even as I read about mousey heroines with bountiful breasts or angel faced flat chested ones, million dollar deals, chance encounters and personal velocity that never pauses for a moment. Whew!