women, chick lit was an important development: Two years later Colgan had turned strongly against the term chick lit, being the first to state what is now a mainstream position among writers of women's popular fiction: she rejected the term chick lit while defending the cultural value of her work. She observed, "Chick-lit is a deliberately condescending term they use to rubbish us all. If they called it slut-lit it couldn't be any more insulting." Much of the debate at this time was between different generations of women writers: for example, Maureen Dowd (b.1952) described the younger women's work as "all chick and no lit," while Colgan (b.1972) derided the older, female critics of chick lit as "hairy-leggers." There was a "troubling" lack of solidarity. In 2005, debate continued with the publication of editor Elizabeth Merrick's anthology of women's fiction, This Is Not Chick Lit (2005), where Merrick argued in her introduction that "Chick lit's formula numbs our senses." In response, self-identifying chick-lit author Lauren Baratz-Logsted published her own anthology of stories This Is Chick Lit whose project was "born out of anger" and aimed to prove that chick lit was not all "Manolos and cosmos, and cookie-cutter books about women juggling relationships and careers in the new millennium," but rather that the genre deals with "friendship and laughter, love and death - i.e. the stuff of life." In 2007, Diane Shipley came to the genre's defence, arguing that chick lit books increasingly covered serious topics but, anyway, "I just don't see what's morally or intellectually wrong with reading a book you enjoy and relate to, that might not draw deep conclusions about the future of humanity but might cheer you up after a bad day, or see you through your own health problems." However, in general through the late 2000s and 2010s writers of women's popular fiction increasingly distanced themselves from the term chick lit, while arguing that blanket critical dismissals of their work were rooted in sexism. For example, in a 2010 Guardian article, humor writer DJ Connell leads with changing her writing name from Diane to DJ to avoid the chick lit label. Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes, two authors who have enjoyed huge success through and beyond the chick lit era, both now reject the term. Kinsella refers to her own work as "romantic comedy". Keyes said of the term in 2014, At an event at