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“Valley of the Dolls” was panned upon its release in 1966, and Collins’ output has been derided as beach reads and chick lit.

The “chick lit” icon, who is married to her business manager, Henry Wickham, also offered thanks to her family and close friends for supporting her, and to the doctors and nurses who treated her.

If it’s attached to any other kind of boot, it’s green juice, chick lit, drag queen.

Both books were widely acclaimed, even as some critics dismissed them as “chick lit,” a term that Ms. Bank found “denigrating to both readers and writers.”

Despite the fact that critics compared her spare, exacting language to that of any number of male writers, including Hemingway and Salinger — The Los Angeles Times called it “like John Cheever, only funnier” — her book was quickly corralled into the growing herd of woman-centered fiction derisively labeled “chick lit.”