A spate of new articles over the last few weeks have been published with one common theme: the idea that chick lit is dead. Chick lit, that cosmo-swilling, designer store-shopping, man-hunting genre that includes everything from Bridget Jones's Diary to Bergdorf Blondes, which flew from bookstore shelves from the mid-90s to the early 2000s.

However, the genre appears to have stalled with the recession. An article in The Independent explains there are a "new crop of novels that are tackling the fallout from a recession". The Daily Mail touts the arrival of "recessionista lit" and author Sarah Bilston explains to the Guardian how she had to rewrite or alter many of the scenes in her book to be recession-friendly and to reflect the current mood of the times. Bilston predicts:

In the next months and years, expect to see plots that turn on overcoming repossession and job-loss, not shopping and sex. The frothiest novels must respond to a more sober age. Like many American businesses, chick-lit must reinvent itself – fast – if it's going to survive.

If that's the case, and we really do start seeing more authors crank out books about jobless women and their credit woes, chick lit isn't just dead. It deserves to be dragged out into the street and shot.

Let's cut to the chase – most women were reading chick lit because they were looking for an escape. More often than not, heroines were blank, perky everywomen who focused on men, shopping and friends in that order. And we readers of chick lit cared not a bit. Just like romance novel readers before us, we overlooked little things such as plot and characterisation for the chance to step into someone else's uncomplicated world, try on their Jimmy Choos, play around with another type of life and then breeze away with all problems solved. Over the last decade, this fluffy idea of literary escape was tied to ideas of conspicuous consumption, lavish lifestyles and shopping. And the authors are right that readers are now feeling the credit pinch behind these lifestyles.

But seriously, do these publishing houses and authors really think we want to listen to people whine and complain about being broke or losing their homes for 300 pages? The navel-gazing heroine who works so well in a vapid little novel becomes insufferable when suddenly tasked with wrestling with larger problems. Where's the fun in crying over credit card bills? (Maybe that's why I never got into the Shopaholic series. Dodging calls from creditors isn't a fun little plot point, it's a grim state of existence.)

This kind of foolish thinking could only stem from the types of privileged authors and people who would do things such as hide their luxury purchases in brown paper bags out of deference to the recession. What a laughable premise, thought up by someone who is still rich enough to afford a Hermes bag, but feel as though it would be gauche to carry it in the traditional store bag. Who are we kidding here? You feel guilty about being rich when the rest of us can barely scrape up the cash to go to Topshop or H&M? Get over yourself! Rich people camouflaging their spending isn't going to help people find jobs, and chick lit heroines fretting over the realities of life isn't going to sell books.

Newsflash to publishers: people are still escaping from their problems. We're just doing it in different ways. Check out the New York Times Best Sellers List in Mass Market Fiction: seven of the 20 books on the list were penned by Charlaine Harris, an author whose series about a telepathic waitress in Louisiana has become a smash hit and a hot television show in the United States. Before Sookie Stackhouse dominated the charts, it was Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series about a girl named Bella who moves to the decidedly unglamorous town of Forks, who drives an old pick-up truck and falls in love with a vampire who sparkles in the sun. Bookstores have tables and tables of supernatural fiction out featuring fairly ordinary heroines, who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances.

We read puffy fiction to escape reality, and if we wanted to hear formerly wealthy people moan about their lives, we could just turn on the news.

Instead, we're curling up with the latest vampire/werewolf novels, eagerly awaiting the next season of Being Human and trying to figure out how best to spend our time after escaping from an office where layoffs have tripled the workload.

One thing we won't be reading? Fiction about the recession.