Why so miserable?

Published on Tuesday 18 November 2008 19:01

THEY say that writing can be cathartic, that putting your thoughts and experiences down on paper can help you process bad memories and exorcise emotional ghosts. If that's true, there must be a whole host of new authors whose lives, to say nothing of their bank accounts, have improved recently.

Over the past few years, the biography shelves in bookshops have become dominated by stories of people who suffered horrifically abusive childhoods.

Nicknamed "misery lit" and called, rather euphemistically, "inspirational memoirs" by publishers, they have titles such as Wasted, Abandoned, Damaged and Please, Daddy, No and offer heart-wrenching, graphic and, above all, supposedly true accounts of horrific childhoods.

However, the degree of truth in many such works – including James Frey's A Million Tiny Pieces and Kathy O'Beirne's Kathy's Story – has increasingly been questioned, with some authors accused of fabricating or embellishing details to latch on to the trend and make a quick buck.

The latest such book to draw controversy is Ugly by Constance Briscoe, which purports to chronicle her abuse as a child at the hands of her mother, Carmen Briscoe-Mitchell. The details are painful, indeed. Briscoe alleges that her mother starved her, deprived her of food, cut and beat her. However, her 73-year-old mother claims otherwise and is suing her daughter, a barrister and part-time judge, for libel.

Given the public's seemingly insatiable appetite for such stories, it could be asked how much fans of misery-lit would really care even if Briscoe's eyewatering tale of abuse turns out to be more fiction than fact?

"I think that to a certain extent readers don't care if these stories are true – they simply find them 'entertaining' for want of a better word," says Tom Tivnan, the features editor of the Bookseller. "I think that people have always had an interest in real-life stories, and the so-called misery lit genre has been a continuation of that."

Though miserable memoirs such as Angela's Ashes had been popular previously, the market exploded when in 2001 Dave Pelzer memoir, A Child Called 'It' – the story of his upbringing by an abusive alcoholic mother – was published in the UK. Today, as much as 30 per cent of the non-fiction paperback chart on any given week is made up of misery memoirs and 85 per cent of the genre's readers are female. The cover art is always bizarrely specific – a bleached-out image of a wide-eyed child against a white background with a hand-written title.

Waterstone's has a "Painful Lives" shelf while Borders has a "Real Lives" section, but the majority of the titles are picked up in the supermarket by the genre's predominantly female fans. And as they crave more graphic content, Pelzer's horrific upbringing has become somehow tame in comparison. Some of the most popular include stories rape, incest and even bestiality.

According to Tivnan this could lead to misery-lit's eventual downfall: "Publishers have had to keep upping the ante in terms of shock value and in many ways the genre doesn't have anywhere new to go now." Perhaps this explains why some authors have been tempted to exaggerate.

The popularity of titles like Ugly seems to be in triggering an equal balance of moral outrage and titillation. The abuse is so horrific, the abusers so evil and the victims so innocent that it's very easy for readers to be utterly outraged, to identify the goodies and the baddies and to know that in being outraged they're on the side of good against evil. And then there's the more uncomfortable element: the titillation.

"I deal with these sorts of stories at work every day and that makes it even harder for me to understand why anyone would consume these books for entertainment," says Dr Michael Drayton, a consultant clinical psychologist. "There is, however, a human fascination with misery and, in particular, sadism – books about concentration camps and, of course, horror films are endlessly popular. But in those you're dealing with things that happened a long time ago and far away, or something purely fictional. "Misery lit" is uncomfortably real and close to home and perhaps that forms a part of the bizarre appeal."

Tivnan believes the market for such writing may be reaching saturation point with fewer such titles next year. However, with catalogues heralding titles as Stolen Innocence, and Too Naughty To Be Loved for publication in early 2009, the sight of commuters and holidaymakers poring over stories of paedophilia and torture is set to continue for some time. If that doesn't make you miserable, I don't know what will.