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Literary porn – Why we’re secretly titillated by misery memoirs

These days, if you pop in to your local bookshop you are far more likely to pick up yet another autobiography revealing the sordid details of a despondent childhood than to leaf through an uplifting story of human endeavour. Welcome to the ever-expanding misery memoir market. The titles weighing down the shelves of bookshops throughout Britain, and on the other side of the Atlantic too, tell their own story. Behind Closed Doors, Don’t Ever Tell, God’s Call Girl, A Child Called It, Don’t Tell Mummy, Sickened – they all point to the dark and menacing secrets of a childhood dominated by toxic parents and other assorted paedophiles.

If you have lived long enough you’ve seen a few trends in book themes come and go – the lawyer/political thriller years i.e. Grisham/Clancey, the self analytical self help trend, and very recently the plethora of books on the middle-east. All trends gets tiresome. A subject is mined for all it is worth and the public moves on to the next trend, so to that extent I was ready to sympathize with Mr. Furedi. Then he ends with this trite antedote,

It is perhaps not surprising, then, that none of my friends revel in painful childhood memories. Back in August, four of us met up for a drink, and we talked a lot about how we got into trouble together when we were kids. We recalled accidents, misunderstandings, arguments – but instead of morosely dwelling on the bad stuff that occurred, we talked about what we did and what we became. And that, too, is ‘real life’, something which we forget at our peril.

That some people have pretty good or at least not remarkably miserable childhoods is great. But that attitude which I have seen too many times is, hey you’re childhood was scared by violence-abuse OK, so what life is hard move on, is jarring in its callousness. It is all too common for people to avoid confronting painful memories and how those memories shape their lives. That Furedi doesn’t want his rose colored view of what happens behind closed of the middle-class in a western culture that is supposedly past engaging in any sordid mean behavior is one version of hey dude you’re bringing me down, ruining my trip. It might have been a more helpful observation if he had suggested that as a culture we face our demons, that individual victims get help in coming to terms with them, and find a way to live a happier life despite any abuse they may have suffered. He is mistaken to extract from this current passing trend that the U.S. or Britain is enjoying a culture of misery. On the contrary, those books are selling because of two reasons. Some people who’ve had similar experiences find solace in the fact that they are not alone. The others gain insights into experiences they have not had – a function that written stories have served since Chaucer.

Eugene Manet on the Isle of Wight by Berthe Morisot 1280×1024

Berthe Morisot (1841-1895)

Berthe Morisot, French painter and printmaker. She was associated with Impressionism. She was born in Bourges, the daughter of a government official who was an enthusiastic amateur painter and supporter of the arts. She was also the granddaughter of Fragonard.

Right Wing bloggers wrong again. Anyone surprised?