The Jilly Cooper Book Club was set up about a decade ago by two friends who’d had enough of book groups where someone would insist, ‘We really must do Dostoevsky this year.’ Members of the JCBC, in a co-founder’s words, just wanted to get together to ‘drink champagne and shriek about Jilly’.
‘Book clubs are basically Mean Girls for middle-class women’
For some time, I stalked key members on Twitter before managing to wangle an invitation. My first meeting was at a large townhouse in Clapham to discuss Rivals. There was a lot of champagne and a gaggle of smart, entertaining women. One was wearing a Vivienne Westwood corset dress; another had flown in from California. It was far more glamorous and fun than the usual cheap-wine-and-crisps affairs.
Dame Jilly got to hear of it and invited us to lunch at her house in Gloucestershire, twice. We were featured in a women’s magazine. We did all the blockbusters, Class and The Common Years. We went to each other’s 40th birthday parties and babies’ baptisms. I asked a fellow member to be my daughter’s godmother. The JCBC WhatsApp group, meanwhile, was ‘a lovely thing to have in your pocket’, as one friend put it. We supported fellow members through divorce, miscarriage, bereavement, infertility – and how to deal with ghastly in-laws.
It was all wonderful. Until it wasn’t.
Fault lines began to emerge before the lockdowns. A separate WhatsApp group was set up for the mothers (called, rather wittily, I thought, ‘Rupert Campbell-Brats’). We were told only to mention our children on there henceforth. Then the pandemic happened, and the meetings never properly got going again. There was a bit of half-hearted chat about doing the new book, Tackle! But increasingly, the WhatsApp group was where everything happened for the JCBC.
I had moved to the country by now and increasingly found the chats to be about things in which I had no interest: vegan recipes; ‘sexy fairy tale’ romances.
Worse, the group was becoming an uncomfortable place to be if you didn’t share the groupthink on, variously, the efficacy of the Covid vaccinations, abortion rights and gender. I’d mostly scroll past these discussions or just drop off them for a while. But one member became ever more strident in her radical trans views. And gradually the group ceased to be a fun, supportive haven.
Eventually, I got fed up. The other day, in an unedifying spat on another platform with one of the group’s members, I took issue with being labelled ‘hateful’ and ‘on the wrong side of history’. Told that I should examine my own heart and ‘what you would wish for your friends and children’, I retorted that I’d like a future that wasn’t Orwellian – adding (though I knew it was inflammatory): ‘It’s women who go through the menopause.’
I woke up the next morning to find myself defenestrated by the Jilly Cooper Book Club. It was a horrible shock. The final message I saw on the WhatsApp group was someone saying it gave them ‘great pleasure’ to tell me ‘to fuck off from us for good. Bye!’.
There are thousands of book clubs in Britain. During the pandemic they proliferated on Zoom and in the #BookTok corner of TikTok. Dakota Johnson is the latest female celebrity to launch her own book club, joining Oprah, Reece Witherspoon, the pop star Dua Lipa and even Queen Camilla, who has her own ‘Reading Room’ on Instagram.
Book clubs are largely run by women for women. But far from being safe, sisterly spaces, go online and you’ll find hundreds of threads about the toxicity of the female book group: the false sense of belonging, the bashing of anyone who doesn’t share the same opinions. ‘We have a problem in our book club,’ reads one of many Mumsnet posts. ‘One of our members is not as literary as us.’
Even Gen Z-ers are tearing themselves apart over their #BookTok clubs. Some worry the clubs are more concerned with a lifestyle aesthetic than providing a space to focus on actual reading.
‘Book clubs are basically Mean Girls for middle-class women,’ sighs a contemporary – who was kicked out of her book group for failing to be sufficiently engaged. Another left her book group because they refused to read feminist writers who weren’t sufficiently ‘inclusive’. One woman was labelled a bit ‘mad and weird’ after suggesting her book group read Michel Houellebecq’s Platform.
Every book club has its ayatollah, usually the founder. The role brings out despotic tendencies. Stories flood in from friends about their own cancellations. One club founder would complain if others hadn’t finished the book. Never mind that she didn’t work and most of the members did. ‘How hard can it be to just sit down for an afternoon and finish it?’ she asked when the group met.
There are ways of making a book club work harmoniously. My new club uses the WhatsApp group purely for admin. It is not a place for pseudo group therapy or political discussions. When we do meet up, the wine and food are excellent. This group has been a good way to meet women in a part of the country where I arrived knowing very few people. If I don’t like a book, or haven’t
finished it, no one seems to mind.
But I miss the Jilly Book Club of old. Re-reading Rivals alone ahead of the Disney+ TV series isn’t the same. But it has made me realise that some may find Cooper’s work distinctly problematic by today’s standards. The publication of Tackle! was reportedly held up by ‘sensitivity’ readers. I wonder how long it will be before the Jilly Cooper Book Club turns on Jilly herself.
