Bicoastal Babe Cynthia Langston hangs out on the West Coast with her new book - By N.L. Belardes

She’s a Playboy writer, a film buff and reviewer, and a self-proclaimed bicoastal babe. She’s a jet-setter who travels from coast to coast in a fast-moving trend-setting life of her own. And she’s a past controversial writer of straight-to-the-heart sex talk that would surely leave me squeamish in an interview.

It’s always fun to be embarrassed, isn’t it?

I hate when girls can out potty talk me.

Meet Cynthia Langston, hip novelist of urban fiction otherwise known as “Chick Lit”. I met her recently at a book signing and we talked shop about novels, blogs, and marketing in the new age of published writers.



On my way to see Disney’s Cars, I popped into Russo’s Books to talk to Mike Russo and instead stumbled into Cynthia Langston hanging out at a table stacked with the light blue cloudy covers of her just released novel, Bicoastal Babe.

No, she didn’t write a tale about trendy lesbians on the beach or hot chicks with psychosomatic disorders. Bicoastal Babe fits the character path of the bumbling heroine and reminds me of the opposite gender “Boy Lit” novel, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity. In Bicoastal Babe the reader sees into the world of women: the heartache, the reality of compartmentalization, and the often superficial aspects of both sexes. If you’re a man reading Bicoastal Babe you realize you’re getting a glimpse into the secret and often unspoken world of fast-moving women.



In today’s world of popular urban sarcasm in literature, TV and film, writing deservedly comes from a style of individuals confident in their ability to be brash, witty, and humbly self-humiliating. This is the kind of company Cynthia Langston enjoys as a writer: unafraid to be wacky, dramatic and critical in the same breath. That’s confidence.

Such a style makes for a good read.

“Chick Lit” is an uncomplimentary genre term for a writer like Cynthia Langston who knows how to follow a literary genre model, but who captures the silliness, drama and daily tragedy of being human in a flowing, entertaining style that sparks giggles. Her novel is likely more true-to-life than she may admit, and its East Coast/West Coast flavors of fashion and men are likely derived from her own media-driven lifestyle. And that’s OK. Langston’s characters appear more honest, more revealing, and give far more deadlier sarcastic stares through the pages of Bicoastal Babe than books like Shopgirl, that are all too playful and overly romantic, though entertaining and quaint. Give me the Chick Lit formula, but give me Cynthia Langston’s harsh reality of business and marketing lifestyles in brushstrokes of prose that convince, entertain and create far too real of a backdrop than most media and marketing folks will admit. I dig it.

I picked up a copy and hope you do too. Heck, you might even learn something about how to spot fashion trends…

This entry was posted by N.L. Belardes, on Sunday, June 11, 2006. You can leave your response.