Waterstone’s now has a “Painful Lives” shelf which features the newest such examples; Borders has a “Real Lives” section.
What lies behind the speedy rise of the “misery memoir”? Is the popularity of these books a healthy sign that Britons are shaking off their stiff upper lips and finally talking out loud about painful events? Or is there an element of voyeurism, even salaciousness, in the snapping up of such memoirs?
I’m of two minds about this new ‘misery lit’ phenomenon. First of all, I do believe it can help people who have been abused to read about others who have gone through similar experiences – reading Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child when I was in my 20’s helped turn my life around at that time.
But having a section in a bookshop called “Painful Lives”??? Is it just me or is that more than somewhat cringemaking? And beyond the suggested elements of voyeurism or salaciousness involved in buying these books, what about the author’s ‘jumping on the abuse victim bandwagon and laughing all the way to the bank’ element?
casa azahar 
I’ve noticed a particular sub-genre: Sad Books About the Hard Lives and Struggles of Women in China. I mean…’Wild Swans’ is fantastic…but there’s fucking tons of them. (Possibly as many as half a billion.)
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Another genre I never heard of before visiting a largish book store in Bristol around 2000 is “Criminal Doctors”. They had a whole section with those books.
OK, I know about a few, but never thought that there was enough to write gazillion of books.
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That means a field day for us Irish! Yaay! Nobody does misery quite like the Irish – We’ve turned it into an world industry.
Lemme see, off the top of my head: Frank McCourt, John McGahern, Peig Sayers, Padraig O’Conaire, Pat McCabe etc. etc.. Don’t read with a sharp implement nearby, I warn you..
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And Joyce was so miserable that he couldn’t even be bothered with punctuation. 😉
Thinking the Misery Lit thing over, it’s probably quite a good thing to have specially labelled places for them in bookshops so that I immediately know which sections to avoid.
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woodpigeon nailed it. The Irish will OWN this genre. I have a book of Irish Christmas stories, and I have never read it all the way through because I am always overcome by the urge to drink myself senseless only a few paragraphs into “and then we ate the fleas from poor Molly’s corpse, o those was hard days…”
Also, at the Chapters stores in Canada, the Bereavement section is right next to the Chocolate and Decadent Desserts section. I. Kid. You. Not.
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Death… Dessert… Alphabetically, it’s not that bad, and they are both things that come at The End.
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Ah but the Irish do seem to have some stiff competition from these Four Yorkshiremen 🙂
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And of course these days we are able to worry about loads o’ shite because we have the extra time and money to afford this particular luxury item.
I’ve met very few people who have had a ‘happy childhood’ – and I’m still not sure that happy childhoods actually exist, or if they even should exist, as they seem an almost surefire way of making one a rather dull and complacent sort – like, why rock the boat?
On the other hand, if you grew up on a leaky boat in choppy waters you at least learned that getting your sense of balance was a primary need, along with learning how to swim (and treading water from time to time).
Meanwhile, I rather think a steady diet of misery lit does more harm than good … as in, it’s good to know you’re not alone, but getting naked and wallowing around in the same mud and shit with strangers is not exactly getting you anywhere.
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