Mis-Lit

Sunny McCreary does not remember ever eating food during his childhood, or indeed having any clothes, toys or friends. The family’s meagre income all went on crack cocaine for his mother and nails for his stepfather to pound into his flesh, his favourite pastime. Kept in a bird coop by his parents, Sunny endured a childhood of neglect, abuse and being bullied. In the course of the most painful life ever, he survived tragedy and maiming, a savage convent-school education, being pimped out, and a degrading addiction. Then things got really bad…

Welcome to the world of the misery memoir. Ever since the publication of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, the bestselling portrayal of an impoverished childhood in Ireland, and Dave Pelzer’s A Child Called It, in which the author chronicled the abuse he suffered at the hands of his alcoholic and mentally unbalanced mother, tales of childhood poverty, depression, addiction and abuse have dominated the book charts.

The titles of recent publishing successes sound like the cries you would hear if you opened the very doors of Hell. Tell Me Why, Mummy: A Little Boy’s Struggle to Survive. No One Wants You: A True Story of a Child Forced into Prostitution. And who could forget Stuart Howarth’s Please, Daddy, No, in which the author recalls how he was repeatedly raped by his father, forced to scoff pigswill and abused by paedophiles before becoming a cocaine addict, an arsonist and, finally, killing his father.

Publishers have made a mint from the genre. According to one estimate, such books account for 9 per cent of the British market, generating £24million of sales. And some predict that the so-called literature of inspiration to be found in the “painful lives” or “endurance and survival” categories of bookshops will expand further, with sub-genres such as medical misery (how my life was made unbearable by Alzheimer’s/depression/cancer/a rare blood disease); dog misery (how Fido helped me through Alzheimer’s/depression/cancer/a rare blood disease) and celebrity misery (Billy Connolly on sex abuse, Sharon Osbourne on overcoming cancer and being married to an incomprehensible Brummie, etc).

But I take the opposite, more cheerful view. I think that the misery-lit bubble is about to burst. And while this may be just wishful thinking – I had a memoir of my own published this year, and hate people assuming that it is of the misery variety – there are several arguments in support of this thesis, not least that the genre has been terminally undermined by scandals over veracity…

Read atTimes Online